Tealeaf: Experience Your Customers

Why Should You Care about the Visitor and the Visit?

Guest blog post by John Butler, Sr. Consultant, Analytics and Optimization, Numeric Analytics —

Garbage In, Garbage Out
Why care about the visitor and the visit? What about why visitors abandoned or why they repeated a process? Why did they give negative feedback via the Voice of Customer survey? Simply put, if you don't care about the visitors, their visits and their feedback when analyzing your web site, you are taking a GIGO approach to analytics. What is the GIGO principle of analytics, you ask? Garbage In, Garbage Out. This may seem a little extreme, but in the early days of analytics, this wasn't too far from the truth.

Let's face it; there is no shortage of data in the analytics world, at least not anymore. Once upon a time, before the days of clickstream analytic tools, the data available for analytics was limited to log files collected by the web server. You were able to get only a limited amount of data, and were left on your own to figure out better and more creative ways to extract something meaningful. Regardless of the number of ways we tried to slice up this data, we were forced to analyze our web traffic at a high level and make some big assumptions about what was good and/or bad for our site.

Meaningful Mobile Analytics: Reach a Customer by Moving to Upstream, Downstream and Device Info

By Janet Jaiswal, Sr. Director of Product Marketing —



At the Mobile Shopping Summit in October, I sat in as a panelist with Josh Himwich, VP of e-commerce solutions at Quidsi, and Jeff Ulrich, Sr. Manager of Emerging Technologies at United Airlines, to discuss how companies can understand their mobile customers better through meaningful analytics. Here are the topics we covered:

• How can a company decide where to devote its resources? Should it add features and functionality or expand to additional platforms?
• How do analytical needs change over the lifecycle of mobile services?
• What kind of information should a company collect about its mobile users? And how should this data be used?
• What type of metrics should a company track about its mobile users?

The Many Shades of CEM: Rapidly Building a Business Case

By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —

Here's the latest installment in my ongoing series on the importance of Business Impact Analysis—the holy grail of Customer Experience Management. So far in this series we've taken a look why being able to conduct a business impact analysis is such an important part of your Customer Experience Management (CEM) practice, and we've also taken a look at how the various web site optimization tools stack up in their ability to provide actionable, business-case-driven data.



Now we're going to take a look at how business impact analysis is performed in Tealeaf. We'll show how to move from discovering an interesting anecdote to building a business case for prioritizing a fix. The key to creating such a business case is understanding that you need to go beyond merely counting how many times online customers encounter an obstacle. The much more important information is how many transactions aren't completed as a result of that obstacle. With this knowledge, you can easily quantify, in monetary terms, how much the issue is really costing your online business. Once you've got that, you can prioritize issues more effectively by their actual business impact. So let's get to it!

Step One: Identify the Root Cause

The Many Shades of CEM: The Real Deal

By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —

Here's the latest installment in my "Many Shades of CEM" series. These posts have focused on Business Impact Analysis—the holy grail of Customer Experience Management. In previous posts I went into detail about the contributions of Web Analytics solutions, Robots and Voice of Customer solutions, and Usability Players and IT Packet Sniffers. In this last installment on CEM offerings, I'll give a quick overview of how Tealeaf CX is alone its ability to rapidly discover obstacles based on customer struggle. As such, it is the only CEM solution that allows you to make rapid website optimization decisions based on business impact analysis of the actual obstacles your customers face on your site.



Yes, Tealeaf uses packet sniffing technology, and yes it has the best replay engine on the market, which can make it sound similar to some of the IT-centric packet sniffers mentioned in earlier posts, but those are just two pieces of a vast enterprise CEM solution that derives its insights from detecting struggle, efficient discovery of actual obstacles, and rapid ad-hoc business case development— in other words, business impact analysis.

Only Tealeaf can:

• Detect struggle by looking for customers repeating behavior that is detrimental to transaction success.
• Faithfully replay the subtle nuances of the obstacles that are causing that struggle in today's rich internet applications, which make heavy use of client-side javascript, AJAX, Flash and Flex.
• Integrate with the leading Voice of Customer solutions and with the call center to enhance the value of these customer feedback mechanisms by allowing you to truly make actionable the insights coming from these powerful awareness mechanisms.
• Provide the business-centric multi-factor search, allowing you to instantly conduct ad-hoc business impact analysis to reveal exactly how much money these obstacles are costing you.

In my next series I'll delve into how to build a business case for Customer Experience Management. Stay tuned!

Mobile Banking: Where Do I Start?

By Julie Zisman, Director of Marketing —

Last week I attended the banking show, BAI Retail Delivery. Most of the show buzz was around digital payment methods and the future of mobile banking. As technologies in this area advance at the speed of light, banks are scrambling to understand how to develop a meaningful mobile channel. Do you develop for a mobile web banking experience, an application or both? Which mobile channel is better for acquisition or self service?

My first piece of advice on this subject is to have a primary understanding of user experience thresholds. I recently saw a report that online shoppers will start an online shopping experience in the morning commute on their phone, continue it in the office on a desktop and finish it at home on an iPad. It's easy to see a banking customer paying bills or conducting online transactions in such a manner. Where, then, should banks start?

The Customer is Always Right! Well, Maybe

By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —

The notion that "the customer is always right" is a trait that sets apart the companies that truly make customer service a priority. For these organizations, going the extra mile to make customers happy is part of their corporate identity. They view this customers-first philosophy as not only the right thing to do, but also a contributor to their long-term success.



But sometimes customers take advantage of a company's good graces for fraudulent purposes, or they can make costly mistakes that lead to the company unfairly footing the bill. This is especially true in an online environment, where it can be difficult to know exactly what an application displayed on the site and how the customer interacted with it. It's hard to know who was right, and yet quite a lot of revenue can hang in the balance from these sorts of issues on any given day. Worst of all, a lack of visibility into online behaviors can make graciousness a very costly virtue.