CEM Best Practice: Observe and Review Actual Customer Behavior

The most customer-centric businesses I have worked with don’t just listen to their customers; they systematically review their customer experience on a regular basis. Retailers do this by observing shoppers in their stores; banks do it by listening to interactions in the call center. For an ebusiness, there is no better way to understand the challenges that your customers face than by actually watching them use your site.

Because Tealeaf gives you a way to conduct direct observation of your online customers, many of our customers have established a weekly customer experience review as a customer experience management best practice. In doing so they:

1. Gather all of the site’s key stakeholders in a weekly meeting.
2. Select one suspected trouble spot to investigate. For example, they may have seen a downturn in new registered users and want to review the registration process.
3. Find customer sessions which demonstrate potentially bad experiences. For example, they could search for customers that abandoned the registration process after trying it three times.
4. Select 20 or so sessions from this list and watch their actual experience going through the registration process.
5. Use Tealeaf to look for other potential problems beyond the one that drove this investigation. Otherwise, you only end up finding the problems you are looking for. Tealeaf customers have found that the most interesting issues or obstacles facing their customers are often ones uncovered during these investigations.
6. Use the insight gained to clarify what problems or issues with this process need improvement.
7. Choose two or three specific things to investigate in more depth based on what came out of this review.

For example, one of our customers knew that users were having problems with the registration process, but was not sure why. The company decided to evaluate this part of its site during its regular customer experience review. After replaying several abandoned registrations in Tealeaf, it found a common thread: customers were seeing an “invalid email address” message and trying to enter their email addresses in new and creative ways—all to no avail. The company then looked up some of the email accounts that customers were entering and found that these people already had accounts.

The customer, an online travel provider, knew that its vacation travelers visited the site infrequently and often could not remember that they already had registered accounts. The insight the company got through its customer experience review made it clear that they needed to design the registration process with existing users in mind. Simply by changing the “invalid email address” message to “email already in use” and implementing better processes for existing users to recover their usernames and passwords, our customer was able to drive a significant increase in conversion rates.

In my experience, most ebusinesses understand the strengths and weaknesses of their sites and have hypotheses about where they need to make improvements. Regular customer experience reviews, supported by tools for observing online customer behavior, make it possible to test these hypotheses with real-life data. Ebusinesses that follow this best practice are often able to address suspected problems before they have a major impact on business. And, they have been able to see what is working well so that they can leverage good ideas across the site.

-- John Dawes, Vice President, Product Management