First off, I have to say that I wasn't there personally to see this magic moment, however the story is so compelling that I want to share it with you.
For years now, we've been proud of the fact that the Tealeaf solution is passive. In “techie” terms that means:
- We take no CPU or other resources
- We add no latency to the site
- We add no risk – because we're “passive”
But, just because Tealeaf is passive, doesn't mean that the usage of Tealeaf has to be.
And for that, I am awarding my own little prize - the Golden Teapot for interesting Tealeaf “story-of-the day” - to our customer Gold Medal Travel, a leading independent travel site with headquarters in the UK. (Sorry guys, there is no actual award, but as you’ll see below, they are being handsomely rewarded for their innovation….)
At our recent UK Customer Forum event (a great event we hold annually in London that brings together our UK customers and prospects), Gold Medal spoke about how they dramatically increased their conversion rate - and thus their revenues and profits - with a novel use of Tealeaf.
Gold Medal created Tealeaf events to monitor whenever somebody makes it to the final step of the process of creating an itinerary. They also created events that fire when somebody adds such a trip but doesn't complete the booking process, for whatever reason.
Further, they allocated 6 service agents from their call center (out of more than 200) as “outbound” revenue recovery agents, and setup the Tealeaf alert console to send these folks a notification whenever somebody made it to the final step, but didn't complete the booking process (i.e. an abandonment).
Now, when their potential customer “abandons” an itinerary at the last step of the process - when they are showing clear “intent” to buy - they get a phone call within minutes asking if they need any assistance with their transaction. Oftentimes these abandonments are not because the user wants to abandon, but rather are forced to, by errors, issues or even having entered their credit card information incorrectly. Regardless, they want to book with Gold Medal, they just can’t.
Call it 'Chutzpah' or 'Pride' – Gold Medal actually demonstrated this process live at the UK Customer Forum.
They got on their live site, went through the process of selecting all the elements for a trip and entered the information for a phantom user – but used the mobile phone number of a random event attendee.
They closed the browser and “abandoned” after they had entered an invalid credit card number that had no chance to go through. 38 seconds later (we timed it with another user’s iPhone stopwatch), the mobile number rang, as a service agent contacted them to see if they needed help with their online purchase. It was a cool demo (and unfortunately for this very diligent agent, this one was not a “real” customer).
However, Gold Medal shared that over the months since building out this process, the results are mind-blowing:
- Their conversion rate at the final step has doubled from 15% to 30%
- The productivity of the “outbound” agents responding to “failed” transactions is much higher than that of the inbound team, which relies on the customer to call them.
It's important to note that we're not talking about site errors or performance problems here - we're talking about optimizing a business process.
Sometimes, the human touch - at the right time - and with the right context (i.e. their session) can pay mind blowing dividends.
So can creatively realizing that solving abandonment is not always about testing pages or fixing issues.
Customer Experience is really all about servicing the customer and finding optimized ways to do it.
Well done.
by: Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO
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