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The Mobile App Gold Rush: Measuring the Nuggets of Success

By Brandon Lopez, Product Marketing —

At first glance, it might seem like a good idea to take the same approach to measuring your mobile apps as you do for measuring your mobile website. After all, regardless of whether their using a native application or a mobile website, your customers' goals are the same. Consumers go to Zappos.com's mobile site to find a great pair of shoes or accessories. Same reason they use the Zappos iPhone app. Now we could debate which platform—mobile site versus mobile app—provides a better customer experience but that's a longer discussion and not the topic for today. My point is, if you're like most industry leaders, your customers are already engaging with your company via their mobile devices, but you're probably not measuring your mobile services very effectively. Truth be told, few companies do.

While part of this challenge lays in technology itself, a big part of the issue stems from the mobile strategy most companies adopt.

On the technology front, measuring native apps can be more difficult because it's not as easy to make instrumentation changes on the fly. You need to plan out well in advance what you'll measure and then tie those plans to your development cycles. If you don't update your native app frequently, it can be extremely difficult to make adjustments to what you're measuring. Ultimately, this hamstrings your ability to analyze mobile users and lessens your ability to improve the mobile feature-set you provide them.

Improve First-Call Resolution or Reduce Call Handle Times? Smart Contact Centers Are Choosing Both!

By Janet Jaiswal, Sr. Director, Product Marketing —

I don't think I'm alone in being more irked by financial services website failures than I am by failures on other online services. Maybe it's because there's more at stake. Worse still is the level of effort typically required to rectify the issue, since you usually have to go through multiple Customer Services Reps (CSRs). It's a common occurrence to be transferred to another agent—and often multiple agents as the issue is repeatedly escalated. Wouldn't it be better service if the first person you reach were able to take care of the issue? I know I'd switch to another bank in a heartbeat if I they were as good at this as, say, Zappos or Charles Schwab.



Of course, this issue plagues many companies across a variety of industries. And all those dissatisfied website customers take a toll. Not only do those companies lose business and customers, they also lose contact center staff—especially Level 1 CSRs, who are often on the receiving end of customer frustration.

Measuring up to the Competition: What Are Your Competitors Measuring on Their Websites and Why?

By Bob Dever, Sr. Director, Corporate Marketing —

Despite the tremendous volume of data you likely gather on your online channels, you might be viewing site optimization with blinders on. And that's probably okay if yours is the only company in your market. But most companies have competitors, and so it's generally a good idea to consider what those competitors are measuring on their sites. How well do they understand their online business and their customers? Are they making incremental improvements that might set give them a leg up? What do you need in order to keep pace or, better yet, get ahead of the pack?

Let's start with the topic of measuring business processes, where it can be especially challenging to detect the many issues that can hinder your success. Here's an example to get things started—are you detecting spikes in failed requests and submissions on your website? Are you able to track them back to why they occurred? Despite the clear sign that something's amiss, not all e-businesses have implemented the capabilities to fully understand why these failures occur. Often the cause is an issue that isn’t readily apparent to those who haven't made customer experience a priority.

Invalid codes can be equally hard to detect. In the retail industry this might be a bad coupon code (or one that wasn't properly entered into the back-end system). For online travel agencies and other industries this might be a promotional code. These types of errors aren't system- or performance-related and are almost impossible to gauge without the proper solutions.



Other examples include Out of Inventory, Invalid Shipping Address, Invalid Shipping Method... the list goes on. In fact, there's almost no end to the number of things that can go astray and only a fraction of them are the types of errors that reveal themselves in web analytics.

If you're not detecting these issues, quantifying their impact and remedying them quickly and efficiently, there's a good chance you're losing ground (and customers) to your competitors. It's the companies that adopt a customer-centric view to their business—and apply that view to improving their e-business processes—that will win online.

So, what are you measuring on your website? What tools are you using? Does it help you to understand how well your critical business processes are working?

Next time as part of our three-part series on measuring up to the competition, we'll look at usability issues.

Stop Flying Blind: Lessons Learned While Launching Mobile Services

By Janet Jaiswal, Sr. Director, Product Marketing —

During the two years I've spent in the mobile market and having launched a successful mobile service at a former company, I've learned the hard way what I should have done and what I should have avoided. As I consider what I've learned, one phrase from a colleague sticks in my mind: “Stop Flying Blind.”


Image courtesy of Business Insider

While I hope the phrase isn't completely descriptive of how I worked in the past, I realize that there were some things I could have done that would have improved the market acceptance of the mobile website and mobile application service I helped my former company launch. I’ve summarized what I've learned into five lessons:

Will the Real Ad-hoc Segmentation Analysis Please Stand Up?

By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —

In the crowded field of web analytics and website optimization, companies are queuing up like contestants at an American Idol casting call to peddle their trendy offerings in “real-time” or “ad-hoc” segmentation. While it might be clear after the first few bars of a demonstration which offerings are merely “good intentions” and which are “serious business,” it can be quite time-consuming to parse the latter group for solutions that offer the real game-changing value: actionable data. Let's face it, most of us don't have Steven Tyler and an audience of millions to help us choose the winner.


Image courtesy of: www.hollywoodreporter.com

What is this ad-hoc segmentation business anyway?

Web analytics is a reporting world. You think up the reports you want, determine which segments you want to monitor, tag your pages, and then get down to the business of counting things. In the past, this has been an important source of information when it comes to monitoring a web site, but it's a fairly static environment. In the modern world of analytics, we rely on our data not only to provide metrics—how many visitors, abandonment and conversion rates. Yet we also want to use the insights we gain from the data to drive site optimization—to justify changes to the website that positively impact the business.

Call Center Myth Busting: CSRs Aren't Capable of Using Real-Time Analytics or Behavior Analysis Tools

By Mike Smitheman, Senior Product Manager —

As an alternative to my day job, I spend time teaching kite surfing in the San Francisco Bay Area. The sport involves flying a large kite and using it to pull yourself across the water on a surfboard. We encourage students to be able to fly the kite blindfolded, with one hand behind their back, while performing some other random activity such as writing their name in the sand, as a way of getting comfortable with the actions required to effectively do the sport.

While such an approach works well for kite surfing, I feel like the same approach is often taken when dealing with Customer Service Reps (CSRs) in the contact center. They are often expected to be able to answer a call blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs. They have little or no visibility into what the customer has just gone through and are not given the tools to resolve the customer's issue...oh, and they are expected to handle the call as quickly as possible and keep the customer happy at the same time! A tall order, wouldn't you say?

No wonder CSR attrition rates often exceed 40% and that the contact center is seen as a cost drain since a large amount of money is spent replacing those CSRs. No matter our jobs and our roles—whether we're CSRs, managers or executives—the majority of us strive to do our jobs well and we should be given the tools and training to have the best opportunity to succeed.