Tealeaf: Visibility. Insight. Answers.

99.999% Uptime? Not Anymore.

by Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO —

Recently this article was published by the New York Times. An excerpt follows:

"MA BELL spoiled us. AT&T’s dial tone set the all-time standard for reliability. It was engineered so that 99.999 percent of the time, you could successfully make a phone call. Five 9s. That works out to being available all but 5.26 minutes a year."

The article goes on to talk about how major service providers like Facebook, Paypal, Google have not been able to meet this goal — and why it make not be practical/cost effective to achieve this goal in the near future. And if the best of the best can’t meet this goal, what about the rest of us?

In the analog world of MA BELL, dial tone was not only easy to measure but also soothing. And, most importantly, dial tone was a clear measure of success.

In today’s digital world, there is no dial tone. You dial the number and hit send on your iPhone. Will the call go through? Will I be able to hear? Will the call get dropped? Will I get stopped by the police for driving and talking on the phone without a handsfree device? More importantly, will I have a productive conversation with whomever I am talking to?

I realized this 10+ years ago before I started Tealeaf. Even though all the status codes were "HTTP 200" and all of the pages were fast and available, my web-based applications still failed and I didn’t know why.

So, performance and availability measures are not enough. In order to understand the customer experience, you have to be able to see it.

I'll Take a Mobile App to Go – Hold the Extras, Please

by Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO —

So, I was putting the Apple iPad through its paces — that is, after I pried it away from my kids, who were happily playing games. Bring up the web browser — sure enough, I can hit every website and it works. Faithfully reproduces the experience of my laptop/desktop.

Then I went to a couple of banks that I have accounts with. I downloaded their native apps. Quick, easy.

The native app (check account balance, recent purchases, etc) seemed like it was much faster. Even faster than my high-powered laptop.

And then I looked around — where did all the junk go? The ads, the images, the offers — all of the stuff that I try to ignore when I am looking at my account balance. Gone, Gone, Gone.

Is this because I am paying for the bandwidth — or in the rush to put out a native iPhone app – did they forget to include the "value added extras"?

A recent survey from Accenture shows what shoppers would most like to see in mobile apps, depicted in the chart below from emarketer.com. (Note: none of them want the "junk.")



According to Janet Hoffman, managing director of Accenture’s Retail Services, in order for companies to deliver a successful customer experience, they must have a deep understanding of their users. This is especially true when it comes to mobile apps: From a recent eMarketer article on the topic, she says:

"Companies need to use all of their customer information to better understand how and when their customers want to engage with them, ask them questions or just check some basic product details. Only then can they deliver a personalized and enjoyable experience, while lessening the risk of alienating customers through unwanted approaches."