Tealeaf: Experience Your Customers

Is m-Commerce a Must-Have for Retailers?

by Sara Richter, EMEA Marketing Director —

The growth of mobile has been well documented with some even estimating that there will be more smartphones than people by the end of 2012.

So are we getting to a stage where any business (and retail businesses in particular) simply can't afford to ignore mobile?

In the first of a series of short videos looking at different aspects of mobile customer experience, we asked Geoff Galat, Tealeaf's CMO, for his thoughts.

My Favorite Mobile Infographics

by Bill Loller, Vice President, Mobile —

Infographics are great; they always provide fantastic nuggets of information and are fun to look at. As mobile adoption and mobile commerce grows, so does the number of mobile infographics. Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order (click the images for full infographic):

Why Mobile Commerce is on the Rise
I really like the "mighty mobile" imagery. This infograph also has some great data, including:

• 87% of the world's population has mobile phones.
• Mobile web surfing will surpass desktop web surfing by 2015.
• More than 300,000 apps have been developed in the last 3 years; these have been downloaded 10.9 billion times.

Mobile E-Commerce Infographic
This infograph is full of data; for example, by 2015, mobile purchases are expected to total $119 billion globally.


The Mobile Advantage
There is no surprise here; according to this infograph 81% of people use social media and word of mouth to spread the word about a good app experience.


Mobile Technology Unites the American Family
This just makes me feel good; nearly half of the survey respondents said mobile devices help their families spend more time together.

Mobile Gives Desktops the Boot

by Bill Loller, Vice President, Mobile —



The penetration of smart phones and related devices like tablets has surpassed all expectations. In Q4 2011, the iPhone business at Apple generated more revenue than all of Microsoft's businesses combined.

Mobile is rapidly replacing the desktop as the primary means to access the web and interact with the world at large. The implications for enterprises are immense. The mobile experience is far more critical than the desktop experience.

Simple, clean, easy to use are the watch words for designing your mobile site and native applications. If a user can't perform a desired transaction in a couple steps you will lose them.

Today Tealeaf announced the availability of CX Mobile; see and design the mobile experience through your customers' eyes. Join us on April 10 for a webcast about the mobile customer experience.

A Few Mobile-Focused New Year's Resolutions for Retailers

By Bob Dever, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing —



Now that the wrapping paper has been recycled, we'd like to suggest a few new year's resolutions for retail executives who want to make the most of their fastest growing digital channel—mobile commerce. These suggestions are based, in part, on the results of the advanced social media analysis we commissioned over the 2011 holiday season:

• Focus on ease of use. Only a small percentage of mobile users feel the ease of use is what they'd expect. That means there's a huge opportunity to make ease of use a competitive advantage, whether for mobile sites or apps. Because of the limited real estate on phone screens, retailers must be as contextual as possible in what they display. It's important to make the shopper's path as easy to navigate as possible.
• Listen. Consumers have many ways of telling retailers (and everyone else) what works and what doesn't—app store reviews, Twitter, Facebook, etc. These consumers are sharing critical information. To improve in mobile retailers need to be open to learning and optimizing based on customer feedback.
• Move from doing things because they are cool to doing things that help customers buy on mobile devices. Think twice before opting for complex processes and always consider a mobile service from the customer's perspective. For instance, consider implementing forms that shift orientation from vertical to horizontal in order to enable easier data entry.
• Understand that the mobile channel is different. To ensure their customers are evangelists instead of naysayers, retailers need a clear understanding of the reality of the mobile experience they provide. They need to uncover the sources of customer struggle and quickly remedy them before additional users are affected. Remember, mobile devices lead to new behaviors—like rotating screens, swiping and varying “folds.” It’s important to correlate customer behaviors with device type in order to pinpoint device-specific issues.

To make 2012 a banner year for your mobile commerce, it's time to tune in to your mobile customers and take a proactive approach to addressing the things that can cause them to struggle across this rapidly growing channel.

Mobile: What's Important to Measure and Why

By Melissa Juan, Mobile Product Manager —



To better understand their users, companies are getting mobile analytics up and running almost as fast as they submit their applications to the marketplace. As traffic in the mobile channel continues to grow (witness the amount of mobile sales on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Free Shipping Day), visibility into what's happening with your customers in this space becomes increasingly important. But is it enough to just apply typical website KPIs to your mobile application? While getting standard metrics—conversion rate, device information and session length—is certainly a good start, these metrics don't paint the whole picture of what's happening with your mobile users. Shopping on a desktop at work or home doesn't compare to shopping on-the-go with a smart phone. The usual metrics that are typically monitored to optimize a website only scratch the surface of the types of data points that are needed to make your mobile application successful.

Here are some additional things you should have insight into in order to make better decisions on making improvements to your mobile application:

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?