Tealeaf: Visibility. Insight. Answers.

Lessons from the Road

We just completed a cross-country seminar-series with the great folks from ZAAZ, a leading digital agency with a substantial analytics consulting practice. The title of the events was “Customer Value Optimization” – which is a concept that our two firms have been working on together.

What is Customer Value Optimization, you ask? I won’t get in to much detail here, but it can be summarized as “Using data-driven methods to enhance customer experience, with the ultimate goal of maximizing customer value.” ZAAZ is world-class at helping companies become more data-driven – and using some of ZAAZ’s methods with the right technology for managing the customer experience yields some pretty incredible results. 

In each city we went to, we had the privilege of meeting and talking to a wide range of people from diverse companies – ranging from Mom & Pops to the Fortune 50.  It was a great experience, the intimate forum enabled some of the participants to “come clean” and admit some of the challenges they face in running an ebusiness with their peers.

Regardless of the industry, size of company, title, or function, there was an impressive amount of consensus around the following points:

• Almost every participant admitted that the customer experience on their site is suboptimal. (Research confirms this)
• People managing sites don’t know enough about what works at what doesn’t – they typically have aggregate statistics, or a small subset of qualitative feedback.
• Most companies don’t know how to pick which aspects of their site to focus on, other than the obvious fires or an executive’s pet projects.
• Everyone says they have lots of data. But, they’re not sure if they have the right data, and they most certainly don’t know how to act on data.

There was a lot of talk about the state of the world we live in, with demanding and empowered customers, expectations of immediate gratification, and competition around every corner. So, everyone seemed to agree that customer experience is core to how businesses thrive online. But it’s hard to know what to do about it, right?

It’s these types of challenges that get me up in the morning, and that inspired us to do these events in the first place.  Running a big web site is hard. I’ve done it, and I felt the pain of everyone in the audience at these seminars, and everyone out there doing it now.  But there are things that can help – a lot. All of us at ZAAZ and Tealeaf have seen how with the right framework, the chaos of millions of customers zooming around your site (and your competitors’ sites) can be channeled into beautiful insights and attainable goals.  Managers and practitioners who are equipped with the right tools (technology and data) and processes (methods and best practices) can become heroes.

At these events, we were fortunate enough to hear from a few of these heroes who have already seen some of these successes. A manager from a multi-billion dollar Telco provider explained how they are successfully keeping customers on the site, and preventing calls into customer service, by collecting data about customer issues at each step of the process funnel – and then prioritizing fixes in real-time. Someone from a major travel portal explained how he has reclaimed millions of dollars in revenue simply by cleaning up confusing instructions on their login screen. These two companies found these opportunities not by hunting and pecking for a “needle in a haystack” – but rather by applying the discipline of focus:  using the right tools and processes to identify opportunities, prioritize them, and make improvements FAST.

All buzzwords aside, this is customer value optimization. (See? I’m not even capitalizing it!)  The bag of tricks you need to get started with the data-driven processes that enable this type of work is not very intimidating. In fact, the ZAAZ guys can explain it to you very clearly and eloquently, as they did in the seminars. At Tealeaf, our goal is to help you apply an understanding of the customer experience to these processes.  The magic happens at the convergence of these two concepts.

If you want to learn more about it, hear additional examples or have questions on how you can get started, check out a free webinar on Wednesday.

Hope you can join us, we'd like to hear about your challenges, solutions and successes.

-- John Berkley
Director of Product Management, Tealeaf

The Big Hairy Churn Monster

How much time and money is spent today acquiring a new customer? Corporations often create elaborate promotions that include incentives that render the immediate acquisition unprofitable. Their hope is that the newly acquired customers will stay with them long enough to make them profitable. Quite a concept when in most cases customers will actually stay with their current product or service provider as long as the product or service meets the customer expectation and they are treated fairly, with respect, in a timely manner when things go awry.

Today, Tealeaf announced the next versions of our cxReveal and cxVerify product lines to address front-line service issues related to online customers. The genesis of these versions stemmed from the fact that customer churn and ongoing dispute resolution, respectively, are big issues that companies need to address. The next time one of their online customers contacts them will probably be their last time if they are not served well. One more service failure, especially in an environment where customers have already tried to serve themselves, and they are gone. The announcement got me thinking, are our current customers the “elephant in the room?”

I am continually amazed at how little emphasis is placed on customer advocacy in today’s corporate culture. When times were tough in the technology sector after the bubble burst, service budgets disappeared. Lean was the mantra of the day…more with less. What a mistake. And as the internet has continued to mature, companies have become convinced that by providing a self-service channel they are actually developing more loyal, profitable customers. Well I am here to be a voice of those customers, it isn’t working.

What companies need to do is place as much, if not more focus, on the service, as in “customer service”, that they are providing. And they need to do this for all channels of interaction. Why is it that…

•  The teller at my local bank branch doesn’t know that I have recently been looking at mortgage products online?

•  The travel agent that I am speaking with on the phone doesn’t know that I am currently looking at the flight options for the multi-leg awards flight that I am hoping to book?

Is this rocket science? I don’t think so. Leading companies today have recognized that a solution exists, and are making inroads, but the majority operate without acknowledging this key weakness.

In my opinion, companies that value their customers, and make investment in serving them well with a unified, cross channel service approach—and one that emphasizes the internet as a key component—will win. Otherwise the big, hairy churn monster will get them. After recently reading some children’s books at the local independent bookstore I thought that it might be a good idea to pen a CEO’s version of a picture book. The storyline would be a combination of “Alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day”, “There’s a nightmare in my closet”, and “We’re going on a bear hunt.” It would rhyme nonsensically like a Dr. Seuss story and have imagery that mimicked Maurice Sendak’s works. I’m not sure what the title would be…maybe “The Big Hairy Churn Monster!”, or “No More Churning!”, or “Where Have All My Customer’s Gone?”, or even “Serve Ice, A Chilling Internet Fable.”

--Scott Jones, Product Management

A Defining Moment...

With the launch of Tealeaf 6.0 product family we have taken a big step to answering a resounding question heard from our customers...  Why?

• Why do my customers abandon my site?
• Why does this customer believe they are entitled to a lower price?
• Why are my conversion rates not increasing?

Companies are asking "Why can't I run my online business with more visibility"?  At Tealeaf, we developed our solution to deliver visibility, insight and answers to those questions.

Metrics don't abandon web sites, PEOPLE abandon web sites

I travel often, visiting analysts, press, customers and prospects, and in doing so am exposed to many of the challenges of our customers first-hand. One visit to a CIO of a large retail chain stands out. He posed what seemed to be a simple question:

"In all of your experiences and with all the information you have collected supporting your value proposition, have you ever seen any data on the acceptable rate of failure for Web-based transactions?"

I pondered momentarily, sifting through all the reports I have seen, read, or even commissioned, when it hit me, and I answered:

"Why should it be any different than the rate of failure for transactions in one of your stores?"

When the Web was "new", it was somehow acceptable for businesses to allow their customers to fail online, when it has never been acceptable for other channels. How do businesses protect against the failure of customers to complete a purchase or transaction when in a store? Through active management - fueled by observation.

They actively manage the business as a result of what they see - if lines at checkout are long, they open more registers, if one teller is tied up in a lengthy process, they call-in more tellers. If lines are short, retailers close registers and have clerks attend to other business activities such as merchandising, restocking, and inventory. This real-time ability to observe - visibility - has been missing online. Because you can't see what your customers are seeing and doing and apply the same active responses to eliminate the hurdles that get in their way of conducting business with you, you are already running at a disadvantage.

To try and fill that gap (really a chasm), Ebusiness teams do what they can, using a bunch of data points in an effort to understand the customer and their own sites behaviors. But data points, whether web analytics, performance and availability metrics or call center logs will never tell the full story, because data is single dimensional, quantitative in nature.

Based upon solely quantitative analysis, the San Diego Chargers won the Super Bowl this year, my beloved Yankees have not lost a game this decade and Al Gore is finishing his second term as President.  Obviously, quantitative analysis does not tell the complete story.

Customers are not data points, they are people. You have to rely on a combination of quantitative and qualitative information to truly understand what your customer sees and does (and what you site does right back to them). Unfortunately, the web itself is pretty one-dimensional, you can't easily see the customer, since they are out there on the other side of the "cloud", in a browser.  That has forced them to be viewed as data, since their interactions are "data-based". I guarantee you that online customers (and I speak as a proud member of that club) do not view themselves as data.

I'd love to hear your thoughts........

Geoff Galat