Tealeaf: Experience Your Customers

How to Take Action on Voice of Customer Insights

By Bonny Evans, Best Practices Manager —

Do you use the customer feedback gathered by your Voice of Customer (VOC) program to identify issues with your website? If so, ask yourself… how much of the feedback you receive is directly actionable? Are you able to identify opportunities to improve your online customer experience? It can be a challenge to identify next steps from customer feedback alone. While VOC provides a measure of how well your online customer experience is meeting your customer's needs and feedback that can indicate areas where visitors encounter obstacles on your site, the level of detail in the feedback is not typically enough to act without additional information.



Before I came to Tealeaf, I worked for a customer experience management company where a part of my focus was VOC analytics. I regularly came across companies where their feedback data indicated how difficult their site was to use, but did not convey details about the usability issue in a manner that could be acted on directly. So implementing an effective site redesign effort to improve that aspect of the online customer experience was much easier said than done.

Using Tealeaf in combination with your VOC program will enable you to take action on this customer feedback. There are a few steps you can take to not only understand usability issues, problems on the site and areas of customer struggle, but to also set a course of action. Here are some steps to get started:

Why Integrate Tealeaf with Adobe SiteCatalyst?

Guest Post by John Butler, Senior Consultant, Analytics and Optimization, Numeric Analytics —

Why Integrate?

Predictive analytics is the process of analyzing current and historical facts to make predictions about future events. The use of statistical analysis to extract information from data and use it to predict future trends and behavior conjures images of the film "Minority Report," where powerful computer systems (and the aid of some special skills individuals) are able to predict what people will do, before they do it, preemptively eliminating crime in this future world.



This type of predictive analytics is the ultimate goal for those of us who work in web analytics: the ability to proactively determine issues before they become problems. Predictive analytics is also the ability to understand our web site visitors so well that we can predict what issues they might have and fix them before they ever experience them. Fortunately for us, unlike in Minority Report, our e-business decisions won't ruin lives if the computer makes a mistake.

While predictive analytics is already in use in many areas—like actuarial science, financial services, insurance, telecommunications, retail, travel, healthcare and even criminal investigations—it is still evolving for the world of e-business and web analytics. We are now collecting more data than ever but the trick is in slicing and dicing the data we have in ways that allow us to proactively determine what needs to be fixed in our environments. Clickstream tools like Adobe SiteCatalyst do a great job of answering the high-level quantitative 'what' questions like:

Naughty and Nice: Mobile Buzz Abounds This Holiday Season

By Bob Dever, Sr. Director of Marketing —

To get a feel for how satisfied mobile shoppers are this holiday season, Tealeaf commissioned Crimson Hexagon to perform advanced sentiment analysis of social media comments about mobile commerce with the top 35 mobile retailers worldwide. We found some pretty interesting results.



For example, we found that more than half of the comments about mobile shopping with those top retailers were positive, including such mobile magic as:

shopping on _____mobile in class !!! (: lol at least it goes along w/ what im learning in economics right now lol

We just passed fools camping outside of _____. folks, you want good deals? there's an app for that!

A big percentage of these positive comments focused on ease of use, time savings and instant deals. That said, while more than a third of the positive comments were in praise of mobile features and functionality, less than a fifth stated mobile sites and apps were easy to use.

Even the Best Can Get Much Better

The Crimson Hexagon study also reveals that when it comes to mobile, retailers still have much work to do. Even for the most successful retailers, which account for the vast majority of sales to mobile devices, 41% of consumer comments indicated frustration. Most of these negative comments were about issues we categorize as "customer struggle"—the things that cause customers to churn as they try to complete transactions. Struggle sources include things like apps that don't work as promised or forms that are difficult to complete from a mobile device. Customer struggle doesn't always prevent consumers from buying, but it frequently keeps them from returning and often incites them to share their opinions very publicly. Here are a few choice comments in this category:

#_____ mobile is down. Not letting me checkout. CS says it's a known problem. On BlackFriday? I just missed two deals!!

#______ mobile site does not allow me to filter or advance pages on their sale page and provides no option to browse regular site #fail

Users have unreasonably high expectations for the mobile shopping experience. In fact, a study by Harris Interactive earlier this year showed that 85% of adults who have completed a transaction using a mobile device expect the experience to be better than when using a desktop computer. What's more, 63% said that a failed mobile transaction would keep them from doing business with the faulty retailer across any channel. So the stakes are high for the holiday season and beyond.

Got a mobile customer struggle example to share?

Improving Mobile App User Ratings

By Melissa Juan, Mobile Product Manager —

The customer experience you provide is one of the most important factors in maintaining the integrity of your brand. This is true no matter what your offering is and no matter the customer channel—especially mobile. For a website, if your customers can't accomplish what they've set out to do, you can measure the negative repercussions through metrics like CSAT (customer satisfaction) and NPS (Net Promoter Score). For mobile applications, however, if a customer doesn't have a great experience, you see the results in a much more public way—the user ratings in an application store or marketplace.



Like CSAT and NPS, negative feedback on an app shows what people think of your offering. However, there's a much more causal effect from poor rankings in an app store or marketplace. Negative ratings there translate almost immediately to lost opportunity. That's because low ratings dictate your standings in the store. The coveted spotlight of a store's top 25 list shines on only those applications that are downloaded the most, and you can bet those are the ones that have high ratings and satisfied customers. With your app poorly rated and buried at the bottom, you open the door for competitors to swoop in and steal your mobile traffic.

To ensure that you stay head and shoulders above your competitors in the mobile channel, it's increasingly important to stay in-tune with your customer experience and find ways to make ongoing improvements in that area. Remember, the expectations are very high for mobile apps. Your customers expect them to let them do almost anything from anywhere. So when you provide a customer experience that falls short of their lofty expectations, your customers will opt instead for one that doesn't. Know the pain points in your mobile application, which devices it accommodates, and where your app works and where it doesn't. Understanding and preventing failure in these areas will eliminate the frustration your customers will have when they need your app the most—such as when making last-minute reservations from a cab, purchasing groceries while on the bus, or buying tickets to a sold-out game while waiting in line. When your mobile customers expect such convenience, the last thing they want to see is an error message that asks them to log on to the website. Rather than sharing their feedback directly to you, they'll share it much more publicly—and that's where the trouble really begins.

Observations from the First Annual ACCELERATE Conference

By Janet Jaiswal, Senior Director of Product Marketing —

I recently attended the first annual ACCELERATE conference, hosted by Web Analytics Demystified. I have to say that I was impressed by the turnout of nearly 300 practitioners who were hungry to learn from others' experience, share their best practices and network.



Tealeaf was a sponsor of the event and it was great to see some of our customers such as Dell and Expedia present to the group about how they are using Tealeaf to drive real results. For example, Chauncy Maddox shared ten tips for how her Global Online Analytics Tools (GOAT) team manages the customer experience. She talked about how Dell holds "movie nights," which serve as valuable opportunities for Tealeaf practitioners to share real online customer experiences with an audience spanning departments and roles. Movie nights not only facilitate conversations about website optimizations, they also help to educate executives and stakeholders on the ways that customers can struggle online and the business impact of these issues.

Also, Michael Gulmann, VP of Product at Expedia, talked about how Tealeaf not only helped Expedia to provide a great online experience to so many customers (did you know that Expedia books one of every 20 hotel room in the US?) but to also make all the feedback from their Voice of the Customer program actionable so Expedia is able to gain more value from VoC.

Personally, I came away with the following impressions that serve to reinforce the multi-disciplinary roles that many analytics teams face: Analytics practitioners are highly talented people with many different skill sets. For example, some have technical backgrounds that help them to deploy tags or bring up new solutions and measurement systems, while others have a background in understanding business issues and how to answer those questions with analytics. Still others have knowledge of emerging platforms and channels—such as mobile or social—or have a background in mathematics. Regardless of their background, they provide a valuable service to their organizations and help improve the online performance their companies deliver. After all, you can't improve what you don't measure. Many analytics teams have helped their online businesses along the organizational maturity lifecycle by leveraging customer experience management solutions to gain visibility and insight into their online customers.

Regardless of where an organization may be in its need to manage its online channels, we can all agree that conferences like ACCELERATE and others can help analytics professionals expand their horizons.

PhoCusWright - The Travel Innovation Summit

By Melissa Juan, Mobile Product Manager —

The PhoCusWright Conference is an annual event that showcases the leaders of the travel, tourism and hospitality industry. Even during times of economic hardship, companies have found ways to help consumers save money, reduce hassle, and have 24-hour access to travel services. All this creates more business in an industry that tends to take a hit when the economy takes a nose dive. The industry has gone "mocial," which is a new term to describe both the mobile and social aspects that have carried this industry to the next generation. Travelers want the convenience of easily changing flights at the drop of a hat and renting cars with a couple of taps on their smart phones. They also want to be able to share their experiences with instant gratification to a sympathetic community of like-minded travelers who may be planning the same trip and seeking advice and recommendations.



Although Tealeaf doesn't focus primarily on the travel sector, we were nominated for an innovation award for our CX Mobile solution as an established company who helps big travel brands like Thomas Cook, Choicehotels.com, Air Canada and Expedia.com stay successful. Tealeaf demonstrated how a company can capture both device and network traffic information in a mobile hybrid (mobile web and native mobile application) session, and play it back to a business analyst to provide more insight into a user's experience on a mobile application. We were judged by a discerning panel of travel industry leaders, who based their decision on the following criteria: the demonstration itself, the innovation of the technology, and the ROI and business value of the product and/or service.


Tealeaf shows user actions such as screen rotation, scroll, pinching and zooming

Our solutions ranked highly on all counts and received kudos for its ability to port over its website functionality into the mobile space, bringing visibility, insights and business value to travel companies that have made the mocial leap and want to keep their customers engaged and happy. We displayed the power of seeing a user's mobile session, the actions captured on the device and the valuable insights that we provide to help create an engaging and compelling experience. The award ultimately went to a company that provided an on-demand mobile car service, but we were thrilled to be honored in the mobile innovation category amongst a group of leaders who are paving the way in the mobile travel industry. Look out travel industry, just wait until next year's PhoCusWright conference!