By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —
Here's yet another installment in an ongoing series on the importance of Business Impact Analysis—the holy grail of Customer Experience Management. Last week, I wrote posts on the contributions of Web Analytics solutions and one on Robots and Voice of Customer solutions. Today, I'll shift the focus to two other approaches—Usability Solutions and IT Packet Sniffers. Later this week, I'll conclude this series with a look at how Tealeaf technology approaches Business Impact Analysis.
First off, Usability solutions...
The Usability Players
In the last couple of years a few solutions have cropped-up focusing on a more intensely micro version of web analytics. Rather than trying to make you aware of the macro business trends on your site—like abandonment and the health of your search and email campaigns—these solutions are really interested in optimizing link placement on a page or optimizing how customers move through a set of pages. They do this by overlaying aggregate click data on top of screen shots of your pages and point out which links get clicked the most. These are called "heat maps." Some even use javascript to record the mouse movement to help you further optimize link placement and page layout. These are incredibly powerful solutions for optimizing efficient page usability, but they do not allow you to leverage their replay capabilities to help you discover the obstacles faced by real, live struggling customers, let alone conduct a business case on the insights.
The IT Packet Sniffers
Most of the solutions that call themselves "CEM" solutions fall into this category. Some are inexpensive point solutions and some bolt onto large enterprise IT application stack monitoring suites. Some merely collect production data and identify when customers have encountered performance problems and errors, and some take the technology a step further and will allow you to reproduce the error conditions via a version of replay. However business impact analysis remains elusive for these solutions.
Here's why:
Here's yet another installment in an ongoing series on the importance of Business Impact Analysis—the holy grail of Customer Experience Management. Last week, I wrote posts on the contributions of Web Analytics solutions and one on Robots and Voice of Customer solutions. Today, I'll shift the focus to two other approaches—Usability Solutions and IT Packet Sniffers. Later this week, I'll conclude this series with a look at how Tealeaf technology approaches Business Impact Analysis.
First off, Usability solutions...
The Usability Players
In the last couple of years a few solutions have cropped-up focusing on a more intensely micro version of web analytics. Rather than trying to make you aware of the macro business trends on your site—like abandonment and the health of your search and email campaigns—these solutions are really interested in optimizing link placement on a page or optimizing how customers move through a set of pages. They do this by overlaying aggregate click data on top of screen shots of your pages and point out which links get clicked the most. These are called "heat maps." Some even use javascript to record the mouse movement to help you further optimize link placement and page layout. These are incredibly powerful solutions for optimizing efficient page usability, but they do not allow you to leverage their replay capabilities to help you discover the obstacles faced by real, live struggling customers, let alone conduct a business case on the insights.
The IT Packet Sniffers
Most of the solutions that call themselves "CEM" solutions fall into this category. Some are inexpensive point solutions and some bolt onto large enterprise IT application stack monitoring suites. Some merely collect production data and identify when customers have encountered performance problems and errors, and some take the technology a step further and will allow you to reproduce the error conditions via a version of replay. However business impact analysis remains elusive for these solutions.
Here's why:
- These tools are IT-centric, which means that they are focused on catching and/or reproducing errors. But what if the problems that your customers face are not "errors" in the classic sense? These tools won't help you uncover many of the other types obstacles that customers face because they can't detect customer struggle, only application performance. If you can't use struggle as the basis of your obstacle detection, your replay technology is only good for reproducing errors.
- The search engines in these solutions lack the flexibility to conduct a business centric, ad-hoc search that allows you to place discovered problems in the context of transactional success and failure. If they can't tell you how many transactions are being blocked then they can't conduct an effective business impact analysis. Most of the IT packet sniffers focus on counting how many times an error happens but don't go the extra step of counting how many transactions they prevent, let alone how many transactions are prevented by non-error obstacles like a form that's hard for customers to navigate.
Are you using either of these approaches? If so, please take the opportunity to weigh-in on their strengths and weaknesses.
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