Tealeaf: Visibility. Insight. Answers.

The Golden Teapot Award - Customer Experience Management Excellence

First off, I have to say that I wasn't there personally to see this magic moment, however the story is so compelling that I want to share it with you.

For years now, we've been proud of the fact that the Tealeaf solution is passive. In “techie” terms that means:

• We take no CPU or other resources
• We add no latency to the site
• We add no risk – because we're “passive”

But, just because Tealeaf is passive, doesn't mean that the usage of Tealeaf has to be.

And for that, I am awarding my own little prize - the Golden Teapot for interesting Tealeaf “story-of-the day” -  to our customer Gold Medal Travel, a leading independent travel site with headquarters in the UK. (Sorry guys, there is no actual award, but as you’ll see below, they are being handsomely rewarded for their innovation….)

At our recent UK Customer Forum event (a great event we hold annually in London that brings together our UK customers and prospects), Gold Medal spoke about how they dramatically increased their conversion rate - and thus their revenues and profits -  with a novel use of Tealeaf.

Gold Medal created Tealeaf events to monitor whenever somebody makes it to the final step of the process of creating an itinerary. They also created events that fire when somebody adds such a trip but doesn't complete the booking process, for whatever reason. 

Further, they allocated 6 service agents from their call center (out of more than 200) as “outbound” revenue recovery agents, and setup the Tealeaf alert console to send these folks a notification whenever somebody made it to the final step, but didn't complete the booking process (i.e. an abandonment). 

Now, when their potential customer “abandons” an itinerary at the last step of the process - when they are showing clear “intent” to buy - they get a phone call within minutes asking if they need any assistance with their transaction. Oftentimes these abandonments are not because the user wants to abandon, but rather are forced to, by errors, issues or even having entered their credit card information incorrectly. Regardless, they want to book with Gold Medal, they just can’t.

Call it 'Chutzpah' or 'Pride' – Gold Medal actually demonstrated this process live at the UK Customer Forum.

They got on their live site, went through the process of selecting all the elements for a trip and entered the information for a phantom user – but used the mobile phone number of a random event attendee. 

They closed the browser and “abandoned” after they had entered an invalid credit card number that had no chance to go through.  38 seconds later (we timed it with another user’s iPhone stopwatch), the mobile number rang, as a service agent contacted them to see if they needed help with their online purchase. It was a cool demo (and unfortunately for this very diligent agent, this one was not a “real” customer).  

However, Gold Medal shared that over the months since building out this process, the results are mind-blowing:

• Their conversion rate at the final step has doubled from 15% to 30%
  
  
• The productivity of the “outbound” agents responding to “failed” transactions is much higher than that of the inbound team, which relies on the customer to call them.

It's important to note that we're not talking about site errors or performance problems here - we're talking about optimizing a business process. 

Sometimes, the human touch - at the right time - and with the right context (i.e. their session) can pay mind blowing dividends. 

So can creatively realizing that solving abandonment is not always about testing pages or fixing issues.

Customer Experience is really all about servicing the customer and finding optimized ways to do it.

Well done.

by: Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO

Friendly Fraud - The Best Defense is a Good Offense

Recently, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about 'Friendly Fraud.'

Previously, I've written some documents about the many ways that our customers use Tealeaf data and services to help fight fraud -- however, I must admit that I hadn't spent much time thinking about a supposedly “friendly” form of fraud.

Wikipedia defines Friendly Fraud as:

Friendly fraud (also known as friendly fraud chargeback) is a credit card industry term used to describe a consumer who makes an Internet purchase with his/her own credit card and then issues a chargeback through his/her card provider after receiving the goods or services. When a chargeback occurs, the merchant will always be responsible, regardless of what the they did to verify the transaction. The challenge with friendly fraud is that there is no way to verify the authenticity of the transaction, which is in fact legitimate, because the consumer is the one that is not legitimate.'

According to the Merchant Risk Council, an association that counts leading retailers as members, The average retailer loses 1.1 to 1.5% of revenue due to online fraud.

While you could look at the monetary impact of exchanging crisp dollar bills for 99 pennies and rationalize the missing penny as a cost of doing business -- the potential impact is far too great to ignore:

• If you get too many chargebacks, the banks will take away your credit card rights. No credit cards, no online business. Game over.
• If you are selling a perishable commodity, i.e. an airline ticket, a chargeback costs you the goods and the revenue -- you can't recover the seat on the flight.

I don't see anything friendly about 'Friendly Fraud' -- or any other form of fraud -- so let's talk about how to take action:

1. You can't wait until chargebacks to occur to do something. You need to be proactive.
2. You are not alone, fraud is an industry wide problem -- participating in groups like the Merchant Risk Council and sharing stories and expertise can help.
3. In order to begin the process of slowing down 'Friendly Fraud', you need to record and monitor all online behavior. 

Visibility is the equalizer: Insight into the actions that are taking place

• You can't monitor what you can't measure.
• You can't solve what you can't see: from browser to purchase to shipped goods.
• You don't know what the blinds spots are

How can Tealeaf Help?

By capturing every single customer's visit (as well as the reaction of the site in response to the customer's requests), you have visibility into the complete picture and details of every single interaction so you can:

• Resolve customer disputes quickly and easily by having a permanent, archived and instantly replayable record of all critical online transactions (e.g., all trades, all purchases, etc.)
• Retain a complete record of every single interaction made by an online customer for ongoing audit and record-keeping purposes.
• Review and examine previous customer interactions without requiring technical skills or IT services.

The Payback is in the Playback

With visibility into the transaction you can immediately determine  whether to contest or not? Our customers long ago coined a “catchphrase" about our solution: “The payback is in the playback” –  in this use case, can you see whether the chargeback or disputed purchase is valid? In some cases, the customer is right – how do you know what the customer saw and did?

Don’t just review the order -- but their visits before and after. One of our customers allows their customers to buy and/or sell options on stocks. When they get an online dispute -- with the customer saying that they didn't know that they were trading on 'margin' -- they look at much more than the transaction itself -- they look at the previous online sessions and the follow on sessions. When they see that the customer checked the order status repeatedly -- and only after the market conditions soured -- that the customer complained -- they know who's telling the truth.

Identify Fraudulent Behavior Across Visits

Use forensics to find related sessions. Despite your best intentions, bad things will happen. You may get a chargeback from a particular user. With Tealeaf -- you can search for sessions not just by user name, but by phone number, IP address or anything in the session as a pivot. This allows you to find other occurrences that may have slipped through. You can also create rules to event on these observations in real time -- to add a loss prevention team.

• Use historical data to build/test data mining models, adjust. Since we record everything, the historical data can easily be parametrically extracted (i.e. via a search constraint).
• Review Orders (Loss Prevention). Some of our leading retail customers regularly review online orders prior to shipping to look for unusual patterns.
• Review all chargebacks -- sift. Look for common patterns and trends. Tealeaf enables really powerful ad-hoc segmentation, enabling you to look for anything that occurred during a transaction, or across segments of transactions. This capability to “pattern match” (without having to know in advance what you might want to look for)  allows you to quickly search for the sessions of any user with a chargeback, or all the sessions of any given user who claims a chargeback, to understand true intent, or their personal history with your company (i.e., is this a one-time event or a pattern of behavior), and also allows you to scope the extent of the issues, and associated dollars affected.
• Share -- Do you share 'bad people' profiles with your fellow merchants
• Document -- be able to cooperate with law enforcement – an easy to understand format – actual visualization is so much more powerful than log data, and tells the complete story. With Tealeaf, you can preserve individual sessions for prosecution.

The cost of prevention can't be more than the cost of the problem. At one extreme, you can prevent friendly fraud by disallowing online orders. Obviously, that wouldn't be a popular solution in today's world.

At the same time, any solution has to have a TCO that is well less than cost of the problem. Tealeaf supports variable archiving -- the ability to selectively preserve a percentage of sessions indefinitely -- i.e. keep all traffic for 30 days -- but keep all orders for 120 days.

This cuts down on the storage component costs -- while still yielding high utility value of the data.

In these uncertain economic times, the only certainty is that unscrupulous activity like 'Friendly Fraud' will continue. The best defense is a good offense, the time to act is now, and the best solution is visibility.

by: Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO

The Evolution of the Cookie – Too much of a good thing?

Back when I was a kid, “Cookie Wars” meant choosing between Chips Ahoy, Oreo or Hydrox. Being from Baltimore, the clear winner was Berger’s – a local favorite.

Nowadays, we have a new cookie battleground, the web browser.

Wikipedia HTTP Cookie Definition

HTTP cookies, more commonly referred to as Web cookies, tracking cookies or just cookies, are parcels of text sent by a server to a Web client (usually a browser) and then sent back unchanged by the client each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for authenticating, session tracking (state maintenance), and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences or the contents of their electronic shopping carts.

The term "cookie" is derived from "magic cookie," a well-known concept in UNIX computing which inspired both the idea and the name of HTTP cookies. Tracking cookies track your web browsing habits. They can collect information about pages and advertisements you have seen or any other activity during browsing. Different websites can share tracking cookies, and each website with the same tracking cookie can read the information and write new information into it.

“C is for Cookie”
Everyone loves cookies, the more the merrier – So what’s the fight about?

Everybody is trying to use cookies for different purposes.   In addition to the cookies that are used by mainstream applications for authentication and personalization, cookies are now being set for mash-ups and additional services:  Google Analytics, survey products, chat,  A/B testing , etc.

So, when your application starts breaking in ways that you can’t understand impacting your site and your customer's experience, start counting your cookies. If you are over 15 cookies, start worrying.

Number and size limits of a cookie in Internet Explorer (Microsoft Help and Support)

If a Web application uses more than 19 custom cookies, ASP session state may be lost. Internet Explorer 4.0 and later versions allow a total of 20 cookies for each domain. Because ASPSessionID is a cookie, if you use 20 or more custom cookies, the browser is forced to discard the ASPSessionID cookie and lose the session.

Time for a Diet?

You are not alone, even the Cookie Monster is singing a new tune. In 2006, in response to concerns over childhood obesity even the Cookie Monster had to change his ways and discuss healthy habits, and in 2007 on a Martha Stewart show Cookies became a “sometimes food”.

-- Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO

What happens when the Web is the only choice?

I’ve always been a keen advocate of customer self-service. For most things, I would prefer to get my task (buy, pay, research, gain information) in a quick and efficient manner without relying on anyone else.

In today’s harder economic times, this is even more true, especially when the call center is outsourced and I know more about the issue than they do.  But now, I see something different brewing on the horizon.

We take it for granted that sites like eBay and Facebook are web only – i.e. you can only interact via a computer.

At Amazon and Hotels.com – you have a choice, you can either buy directly on the web site, or you can converse with a human. They want your business and created channels to increase conversion.

Amazon is an interesting case. Even if I am not planning to buy a particular item from Amazon, I do my basic market research there. They have great product descriptions and community reviews, which I have come to depend upon.

Nowadays, the airlines want to charge you to speak to a human being. I am okay with this for the most part – but I feel unfairly penalized when the transaction that I am trying to do cannot be done without a human. I would suggest that they make all business processes self-service capable, if they want to charge me for human intervention.

And now, I see something entirely new. Recently, I received an email from the bank holding my mortgage. Since I had paid the bill online, they decided that the only way that I can receive my year end tax statement is to logon to their site and download and print it.  While this doesn’t sound onerous, and in general I am a believer in “green causes”, I was taken aback by this stance. Where was the choice, what is my alternative? In this case, green was all about saving money, the bank’s.

What this means to me is that when the Web goes from “self-service” to the only channel for interacting with an organization, the web site better work, it needs to be more than just reliable, it needs to be convenient, adaptive and delightful. I’m not sure if my bank is up to this challenge, but in these days of doing “more with less”, I expect to see a lot of companies acting this way.

When the website becomes the only option to convert, transact and communicate, I guess I still always have an option.  If it fails, I take my business to www.somebodyelse.com.

Since consumers still have that option then protecting the success of the online channel is no longer an option for companies, it’s a mandate.

-- Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO

Customer Experience Across the Network with Tealeaf

The Tealeaf Network Effect
Tealeaf today enables online businesses to see their customer’s actual online experience to better analyze their motivations and behavior and understand “why” conversions are occurring, or not.

What’s the vision of Tealeaf for tomorrow:

• What have we learned from helping customers analyze and understand customer behavior on their websites from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and beyond?
• What does Web 3.0 look like for the users and for companies looking to convert on their visitor’s intentions?
• How will the growth of the web and complexity of syndicated content, conversions and partnering across merchants affect online customer behavior?
• What challenges will merchants face in supporting and delivering a user networked experience?

Companies of tomorrow will provide content, services and conversions across a multitude of partners and domains.  When a consumer aligns with a single brand, but the experience spans multiple partners how can the company support the transaction?

• When companies outsource site functions, how can they capture the complete experience?
• When an airline sells a credit card via a partner, how can they assure a successful conversion?
• When a banking customer uses bill pay, who do they contact for assistance and how can a bank support them?

Let’s look at Tealeaf of tomorrow; how extending the visibility of the online user across the network brings value to companies needing to see their complete users experience and ensure success in the face of their customer’s increasing expectations.

Customer Experience Across the Network with Tealeaf

-- Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO

Success is... a customer that "gets it"

There are many stages to starting a software company. You need to have an idea, money, people, infrastructure. But the thing that you need the most are customers who “get it.”

Customers who “get it” not only fill your inbox with bugs and feature requests, they take your product and ideas and apply them in ways that you would never have thought of. And then you sit back and say “Cool” – because you realize that your ideas are truly having an impact.

Key Relevance Review of eMetrics: Hotels.com’s Joe Megibow Keynote
By Liana “Li” Evans
"I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a keynote be so insightful and revealing about a major internet website as I did when I attended Joe Megibow’s Keynote at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC."

Hats off to Hotels.com for really "getting it".

-- Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO

Origins of the Tealeaf Name

I stumbled across an article recently comparing Tealeaf to Apple, Macintosh and Blackberry, well our name specifically, and it had me reminisce about the origins of "Tealeaf" and in turn our path to the name.

Looking for Names in All the Wrong Places: the Power of Borrowing Names by Burt Alper
BlackBerry, Apple, Macintosh. Some of the most successful product names and company names have unexpected roots. For a software technology that’s all about gaining insight into customers’ online experience—and foreseeing and managing future experiences—Tealeaf Technology is a disarmingly intuitive name.

Many people are aware that the core Tealeaf technology originated inside of SAP.   In developing employee self-service applications during 1996-1997, my team became frustrated at the inability to understand and recreate issues that happened at our customer sites, and I felt the obstacles affected others.

While we were at SAP, we called the core technology 'Project Blackbox'. The notion of employing a flight recorder for a transactional web site was easy to understand. With SAP's permission, we received the rights to spinoff the Blackbox technology as an independent, venture funded company in 1999. While we gravitated to the Blackbox name initially -- there were several key challenges:

• Many people associated the value of a blackbox, aka flight recorder as only providing value when things crashed. Our technology was designed to assist with finding and fixing application errors, not disaster recovery.
• There was a successful electronics company called 'Blackbox' -- so calling ourselves Blackbox Software was going to cause confusion.

Around the same time, with a maturing product we started giving our product components names. We quickly seized upon the notion that our capture of user sessions allowed a 'DejaView' like understanding of the user’s experience. People understood and loved the 'Deja' metaphor and soon we were calling the company 'DejaCube'.

Our original thought was that the 'cube container' would allow us to expand the product/messaging as the product suite was developed-- however when we did our first tour of analyst relations -- one analyst insisted that any company with the name 'Cube' in it -- had to be “simply” an OLAP analytics company, not where we were wanting to go.

We took that feedback to heart and we looked at many alternatives before deciding on Tealeaf, a name that conveys both our past heritage and future vision.  Of course, the WWW being what it was the domain was being squatted on; but getting the name at a reasonable price launched our company's brand.

In our company history, there have been some funny tealeaf anecdotes over the years.

To people within the United States, the analogy of reading the tea leaves to understanding web site experience is understood. However, in Germany -- they don't read tea leaves, they read coffee grinds. In the UK, where we now have a thriving presence, tealeaf is slang for thief.

-- Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO

The "V's have it" - Virtualization, Visibility and...

I was talking with a technology partner about what Tealeaf does and what our value is.  He stopped me cold with the observation “Virtualization and Visibility” – that’s what it’s all about.

Webster’s defines Visibility as:
1: the quality or state of being visible
2 a: the degree of clearness (as of the atmosphere or ocean) ; specifically : the greatest distance through the atmosphere toward the horizon at which prominent objects can be identified with the naked eye b: capability of being readily noticed c: capability of affording an unobstructed view d: publicity 2d
3: a measure of the ability of radiant energy to evoke visual sensation

In terms of Tealeaf, Visibility is the power to see your online customer each and every time they visit and interact with your site.

Wikipedia defines virtualization a few ways:
In computing, virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources:

• Resource virtualization, the virtualization of specific system resources, such as storage volumes, name spaces, and network resources
• Application virtualization, the hosting of individual applications on alien hardware/software
• Desktop virtualization, the remote manipulation of a computer desktop

While we’re not part of the first “V” – we are the leader in providing visibility for web applications.

Going against the grain here, I think that there’s another “V’ coming for us as well. Being the nerd that I am, I tend to email my wife instead of walking across the house to talk with her. In our family of 5, we have more computers than people.  Normally, our household computers are 2-3 year old technology built out of scavenged parts. For the first time in a long while, I bought a computer – in a box, at retail. HP slimline, Dual-Core 2.7 GHZ AMD with 4GB of RAM and 500GB SATA drive for $400. At this price, it’s too cheap to pilfer/scavenge/recycle. It came with Windows Vista 64. Admittedly, the first service pack was close to 400MB in size – but so far, I am impressed. It may be the hardware, it may be the ram, but I am liking what I am seeing with Vista-64.

So, time for V**3 – Virtualization, Visibility and Vista.

The "F" Word - Visibility into Fraudulent Online Behavior

It used to be that I couldn't say the "F"(Fraud)' word, but now that it's front and center on our web site as a value proposition, my fingers are allowed to type freely.

Seriously, I've had a lot of interesting conversations with our customers and prospects about how Tealeaf can help with fraud. I'd like to share what I've learned and solicit your feedback and interest in continuing this conversation.

Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that Tealeaf is not a turn-key fraud solution.

Tealeaf's products are designed to acquire data passively (i.e. out of band through a network tap or span port) and Tealeaf's value to solving the fraud problem comes from providing insight to discover, research and investigate the problem and impact, thus assisting a company to trying to take action.

While the topic of online fraud is not openly discussed within the wider eCommerce industry (many valid reasons to limit this information exchange) the research and advisory market is full of reports and analyst findings on the impact.

Traditionally, Tealeaf's insight has been focused on understanding online customer behavior relating to conversion and retention and application and usability problems generating visibility into the resulting business impact.  As Tealeaf's solution captures the complete data set (browser views along with HTTP request and HTTP response data) it becomes a powerful ally in efforts to fight fraud.

How to leverage Tealeaf to help fight fraud: 

• Detection -- Becoming aware of fraudulent activity -- either in real time or post mortem.
• Stop -- Block access to the site, or prevent the goods from leaving (time-delayed).
• Research/Investigation -- With the complete stream of traffic capture and built in analytics we can facilitate forensic discovery pivoting off any session or variable commonality
• Report Impact -- Understanding of the breech by depth, loss data viewed
• Action -- notification of parties affected as well as remediation process

From exchanges during our recent regional customer user groups to conversations with concerned prospects, I felt it was worthwhile to compose a document that explores how Tealeaf could be leveraged to help fight fraud. I've also added a section on guidance and examples of possible solutions by verticals to encourage additional thoughts and comments.

Download the White Paper: Visibility into Fraudulent Behavior with Tealeaf

As always, I'm interested in your thoughts and feedback on the topic and continuing the conversation.  Knowing that the subject isn't likely to be discussed in the open I'm adding my contact information below and encourage your replies.

-- Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO
   CTO@tealeaf.com

A common Tealeaf question and a new way to reply

As the CTO of Tealeaf, I’m fortunate to talk to many organizations interested in improving their customer’s experience.  Whether I’m speaking to the CIO, the VP of eBusiness or the team managing the online channel the question always arises when discussing online customer experience:  “Why does Tealeaf capture everything, what is the data and just what is it used for?"

I’d guess I’ve had this conversation thousands of times since Tealeaf was founded in 1999 and I enjoy seeing how companies can immediately grasp how visibility into their customer can really change the way they conduct their business.  Because I haven’t had a chance to talk to everyone who might be interested in how Tealeaf operates I decided to visually walk someone through how Tealeaf captures the complete user experience.

How does Tealeaf Capture the Complete User Experience?
Here is my answer in video format...

I'm interested to know your thoughts, comments and what questions you come up with next...

-- Robert Wenig, Founder, CTO, Member of Board