Business Process Scorecards: Your Secret Super Power

By Wendy Roth, Education Manager —



As part of our Best Practices series, this post offers a suggestion on how to use business process scorecards to uncover the root cause of an issue.

Remember when conversion funnel reports were cool? When being able to show what percentage of your visitors dropped out at each step impressed your colleagues? This leaves me wondering: When did they become just okay? No one would ever deny that it's useful to know where prospective customers are falling out of your conversion funnel. But what can you do about it?

Well, you can speculate what the reasons are...or you can use Tealeaf business process scorecards to uncover the true cause. Tealeaf business process scorecards look like mild-mannered web analytics conversion funnels. But don't let the glasses fool you...they have x-ray vision that can see beyond the mere fact that visitors dropped out and reveal the reasons why they did so. Because you can drill into and replay the sessions of those who abandoned the process, you can go beyond your assumptions and view it through the eyes of your customers.

How does Tealeaf do this? You'll be relieved, as I was, that super power is not required. To create a business process scorecard, you simply need to identify a multi-step process on your website you’d like to understand better. We're all familiar with the online purchase process, but not every process looks like a purchase. Some processes Tealeaf customers have tracked using business process scorecards include:

• Purchasing phones and service plans for a wireless provider
• Transferring funds between accounts for an online bank
• Redeeming reward points for free nights at a hotel
• Obtaining a car insurance policy quote

To see videos of customers and how they use Tealeaf click here. The process you'd like to track needs to have at least two steps: The point of intent, where visitors indicate they have more than a passing interest in transacting on your site, and the step where the process is completed.

Next, identify the key steps in the process. You might think that your process is easy, but do a little research on Tealeaf first to ensure the process is as streamlined as you think it is. Identify the "end point" URL, and then search for sessions that contain that URL. Replay several to identify the pages or messages a visitor had to see in order to complete the process.

Try to stay at a high level; there may be multiple permutations of your process, but look for the major steps common to most of your visitors. Your process may be only three or four steps.

Step 1: Once you've identified your process steps, create the Events for these steps. Chances are, you already have Events for these major process steps. But be sure that all Step Events are created to count only the first occurrence of the step; otherwise your data will be skewed due to visitors who go back and forth between steps. Your subsequent steps might also need to include multiple Events to verify that the visitor had in fact gone through previous steps, if it's possible for someone to skip a step in the process.

Step 2: To create your business process scorecard, simply enter your process steps in the correct order. You don't need to configure Abandonment events; Tealeaf will automatically calculate where users abandon the process based on the Events you've configured. You don't need to configure Failure Events either; that's something you can add later based on your findings.

Step 3: Now you've got your steps, you can set completion and abandonment grades.



Grade on a curve (Don't worry, I won't tell anyone), but tough enough so that you know when there's a fluctuation that's meaningful to your completion rate.

Step 4: Once your business process scorecard is in place, you'll be able to see where customers are falling out of the business process. But the secret power is the ability to drill into the drop-offs to see why there's a fluctuation. When there's an increase in drop-offs between steps, you don't need to speculate why; you can see exactly what customers encountered.

Instead of trying for weeks or months to replicate what your customers experienced in a step, you'll be able to figure it out quickly so you can swoop in and save the day. Whether or not you secretly wear a super hero spandex suite is up to you.