Why Ebusinesses Need Online Customer Experience Optimization Best Practices

Over the last few years, I have talked to hundreds of people about customer experience management – including Tealeaf customers, prospective customers, and industry analysts and observers. Virtually every one of the people I talk to knows that online customer experience has a lot of room for improvement. After all, no one has ever been able to build and maintain a dynamic web site that works perfectly every moment of every day for every customer. Between implementing new content, changing technology, managing internal stakeholders, and designing for different types of customers, you could never produce a 100 percent error-free site that is highly usable for every visitor.  We have all experienced problems ourselves – not being able to log into an account or add an item to a shopping cart, getting lost in a site’s navigation, or seeing a confusing error message.

So, I find little disagreement in the industry that ebusinesses need to focus on customer experience management. What most of them haven’t been able to do is to take a systematic, quantifiable approach to the problem. Megan Burns of Forrester Research found the same thing when she and her team conducted a customer experience survey earlier this year. In spite of the fact that 91 percent of executives surveyed said that online customer experience is either very important or critical to their companies in 2008, only 12 percent said their organizations take a disciplined approach to customer experience.

Why can’t ebusinesses take a disciplined approach? In my experience, it’s because they don’t have:

1. Defined processes for discovering and fixing customer experience flaws, and
2. A way to collect the kind of information that’s necessary in order to make truly data-driven decisions.

In the absence of defined processes and without a complete picture of user experience, people must rely on opinions and hunches when making major decisions about their web site optimization efforts. Or worse yet, they simply ignore suspected customer experience issues that they cannot explain and/or cannot quantify.

This is why I started a project to bring together the collective knowledge of Tealeaf and its customers into a set of best practices for online customer experience optimization. Over the next few weeks, I will be blogging about these online customer experience optimization best practices. The best practices fall into three phases: what we call Visibility, Insight and Answers.

• Visibility best practices are about setting up the right processes, systems and even mindset to make sure that you become aware of customer experience issues. I will draw on some real-world examples to illustrate the types of problems that Tealeaf customers have uncovered through systematic customer listening initiatives, proactive customer experience reviews, ongoing site metrics reviews and regular application health monitoring.
• Insight best practices will show you how to take a deep look at each customer experience issue until you understand both the root cause of the issue and its business impact. The cornerstone of this process is what I call customer behavior analysis.
• Answers best practices are about use the insights gleaned in the first two phases to implement changes that deliver real improvements to your online customer experience.

I believe all ebusinesses can benefit from putting in place the kind of disciplined approach that our 12 best practices represent. Stay tuned in for more details and I also encourage you to dig deeper by reading our white paper, Establishing a Disciplined Approach to Online Customer Experience Optimization.

I’m looking forward to your comments, as well as your questions, regarding our best practices. Every site is unique so I encourage all of you to share your own challenges and successes to date, and share your feedback as you roll these best practices out within your organization.

-- John Dawes, Vice President, Product Management

Comments

[Paul Blunden]

Hi John,

love the blog and in particular the intent behind this piece - I look forward to learning about best practice from your perspective. I wondered whether you considered widening the debate to multi-channel? Like Tealeaf, at Foviance we have found the online piece to be poor at times and the reasons you state are definitely in our top ten. However we see an even worse situation in the delivery and implementation of multi-channel customer experience. I'd be interested in your thoughts.
Paul