Focus on the Critical “Blind Spots” of Customer Experience

Five years ago, I was the business manager for a high-volume ASP.  We would meet every Friday to talk about went well and what didn’t that week.  Every week, some of the same comments would be made by someone in customer service, marketing, or management – things like “our conversion rate was down this week, and we need to investigate why that may be”… or “we’ve gotten a lot more calls from frustrated customers this week, so we’ve opened a bunch of trouble tickets, and need to ramp up our customer service group.”  It’s amazing to me how little information we had about these issues and it’s even more amazing that we were satisfied with how little information we had.  But, I guess sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know.  Most of us weren’t missing cell-phones in 1990 either.

Many new Tealeaf customers ask us “So, it’s great that we can replay any customer’s session – but which ones are we supposed to look at?”  That’s a great question – and answering it drives so many of the enhancements we’ve made to the product over the last few years.

We eat our own dog food at Tealeaf every day, and use our own products to understand what our web visitors are doing.  So, how do we see our customers?  Which ones do we look at?  Here are a few categories of customer sessions on which to focus.  I often recommend starting with the most critical categories:

• Find customers that are running into trouble
  Two core Tealeaf features, search and events, make this very straight-forward.  Think to yourself… what are a few things that happen when a customer is having a hard time on your site?  Perhaps they click on the “help” button, perhaps they receive an error or a “sorry” message, or perhaps they only make it one or two steps into a process and then abandon entirely.  Any one of these “classes” of customer sessions can be easily found by using Tealeaf’s search engine.  We make it a practice here to pull up at least 20 sessions each week of customers that fall into one of these categories.
• Find customers that are not completing your key processes
  All of our sites exist for a purpose (or many purposes).  Start by thinking about what those purposes are, and don’t be satisfied “not knowing” why some customers succeed and some don’t in achieving that purpose.  So, if there is a sign-up process – find a set of sessions that started the process but didn’t finish.  If it’s a retail site – find customers that started shopping, but didn’t check out.  Every week, I make every effort to view sessions where people aborted their mission mid-way.  Could we have done something better to keep them interested?   Tealeaf events were designed to help you find these exact populations of customers.  On any given day or week, it takes no extra work to pull up some of those sessions and see what happened.
• Any time we’re reviewing sessions – we incorporate Replay
  We’ll watch them closely, and take note of any patterns, making qualitative comments as we go.  When we want even more information, we can do 5 or 10 minutes of additional searching or analysis to really understand not only what happened to these customers, but why it happened.  Sometimes it’s really easy – perhaps a bunch of customers are using an ancient browser type that we’ve never tested.  Sometimes it’s a bit more nuanced – for example, these customers are just getting confused or having a hard time navigating content.  Either way, there is always something actionable and specific that comes out of it.  Maybe we need to fix a problem in the application logic in one place, maybe we just need to fix the wording on one specific form, or maybe we need to improve the navigation or usability.  But, the incredible thing about Tealeaf is that it shows us – for real – how these affect customers.  No guessing, no politics.  And, addressing these things, armed with information about what really happens out there, results in the ultimate outcome: a better site, and more successful customers.

To me, these are some of the easiest ways to know “what’s going on” on the site each week.  Each time we go through this weekly ritual, I think back to the old days, 5 years ago, when I had no idea what the real customer experience looked like.  It was all conjecture and stabs in the dark.  If we just the truth in front of us – the undeniable evidence of what really happened to our customers – those meetings would have been much faster and much more productive.  And more importantly, our site would have been much much better.

-- John Berkley, Director of Product Management 

Comments

[Tom Vander Well]

Great post! For some reason, most businesses want to run from or ignore those "blind spots" as though they will disappear if we just ignore them for a while.

Thank you for walking the service talk.

[John Berkley]

Thanks Tom. Like so many other things... "the first step is denial." That is furthered by the fact that most people don't know that they CAN get visibility into these things, and take actual steps to make them better. That's all changing - and we're pbviously thrilled about that. More and more organizations and people are realizing that not only is there nothing to be afraid of, you will actually become a *hero* by understanding, analyzing, and improving these areas. Your customers (and your management) will love you.