Tealeaf: Experience Your Customers

The Many Shades of CEM: Usability Players and IT Packet Sniffers

By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —

Here's yet another installment in an ongoing series on the importance of Business Impact Analysis—the holy grail of Customer Experience Management. Last week, I wrote posts on the contributions of Web Analytics solutions and one on Robots and Voice of Customer solutions. Today, I'll shift the focus to two other approaches—Usability Solutions and IT Packet Sniffers. Later this week, I'll conclude this series with a look at how Tealeaf technology approaches Business Impact Analysis.

First off, Usability solutions...

The Usability Players

In the last couple of years a few solutions have cropped-up focusing on a more intensely micro version of web analytics. Rather than trying to make you aware of the macro business trends on your site—like abandonment and the health of your search and email campaigns—these solutions are really interested in optimizing link placement on a page or optimizing how customers move through a set of pages. They do this by overlaying aggregate click data on top of screen shots of your pages and point out which links get clicked the most. These are called "heat maps." Some even use javascript to record the mouse movement to help you further optimize link placement and page layout. These are incredibly powerful solutions for optimizing efficient page usability, but they do not allow you to leverage their replay capabilities to help you discover the obstacles faced by real, live struggling customers, let alone conduct a business case on the insights.

The IT Packet Sniffers

Most of the solutions that call themselves "CEM" solutions fall into this category. Some are inexpensive point solutions and some bolt onto large enterprise IT application stack monitoring suites. Some merely collect production data and identify when customers have encountered performance problems and errors, and some take the technology a step further and will allow you to reproduce the error conditions via a version of replay. However business impact analysis remains elusive for these solutions.

Here's why:

The Many Shades of CEM: Robots and Voice of Customer

By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —

Here's my latest installment in an ongoing series on the importance of and solutions for Business Impact Analysis—the holy grail of Customer Experience Management. A few weeks ago, I wrote on why Business Impact Analysis is so important.

Earlier this week, I started this series on the "Many Shades of CEM" by considering Web Analytics solutions and their ability to perform Business Impact Analysis. Today, I'll shift the focus to two other approaches—The Robots and Voice of Customer solutions.

The Robots

There are a variety of solutions used internally during the development and testing phase of the application lifecycle—as well some that operate external to your production application—in order to run a series of scripts or test cases looking for errors, slow pages, and other "outages." While these tools are very handy for managing to an IT performance SLA, they cannot perform adequate business impact analysis.

Here's why:

The Many Shades of CEM: Web Analytics

By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —

In the first part of this series we took a look at why business impact analysis is such an important part of a CEM practice. Now we'll take a look at some of the different approaches to CEM and how they measure up in their business impact analysis capabilities.

I'll start with Web Analytics.

Web analytics is the stalwart of the web optimization landscape. Ecommerce platforms truly cannot live without it. In addition to being the system of record for the online business—measuring the performance of the business from funnel reporting to conversion rates—Web Analytics is also very helpful for managing search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), email campaign management and path analysis.

Yet when it comes to business impact analysis CEM-style, web analytics solutions get thin very quickly. Here's why:

Automated Insights Help Maximize Analyst Resources and Drive Customer Experience Results

By Brandon Lopez, Product Marketing —

A common complaint I hear from prospective customers is that they don't have enough resources (e.g., analyst headcount) to maximize their online analysis capabilities. After all, it's difficult to find talented analysts and every dollar invested in analytic solutions is heavily scrutinized in today's challenging economy. This often leads to trying to do far too much with too few resources and, ultimately, suboptimal results.



To counter this challenge, many of our customers begin with a conservative approach to site optimization. They start small, with one analyst (in some cases less than half of their time spent in Tealeaf), and get immense value from what we call 'find and fix,' or performing basic research to investigate a problem. This forensic analysis could stem from a customer call into the contact center or a rant on Twitter seen by the CEO, but in many cases the optimization efforts are only as good as the awareness into the problem.

Will the Real Ad-hoc Segmentation Please Stand up? Part II

By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —

In part one of this series I discussed the challenges inherent in ad-hoc segmentation and where many analytics solutions fall short. In this post, I'd like to focus on Tealeaf's unique approach to ad-hoc segmentation and how we are different from other solutions. Of course, ultimately, you get to be the judge of which solutions are most effective. It's like American Idol, but your criteria will be whether or not those solutions actually deliver on their promise of providing rapidly available and actionable data.


Visitor-level search with Tealeaf cxResults. Image courtesy of Tealeaf Technology

Tealeaf CX 8.2's method of ad-hoc segmentation, as realized with our cxResults product, picks up where web analytics products leave off. Not only does Tealeaf have the ability to produce real-time awareness of business trends (where web analytics data may be a day old), Tealeaf can also enhance that awareness with richer business insights than web analytics ad-hoc segmentation. So, for example, you might find yourself saying, "Not only are first-time visitors from campaign X having trouble, but that trouble is due to a completely unknown issue and it's costing us $500K a week."

Will the Real Ad-hoc Segmentation Analysis Please Stand Up?

By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —

In the crowded field of web analytics and website optimization, companies are queuing up like contestants at an American Idol casting call to peddle their trendy offerings in “real-time” or “ad-hoc” segmentation. While it might be clear after the first few bars of a demonstration which offerings are merely “good intentions” and which are “serious business,” it can be quite time-consuming to parse the latter group for solutions that offer the real game-changing value: actionable data. Let's face it, most of us don't have Steven Tyler and an audience of millions to help us choose the winner.


Image courtesy of: www.hollywoodreporter.com

What is this ad-hoc segmentation business anyway?

Web analytics is a reporting world. You think up the reports you want, determine which segments you want to monitor, tag your pages, and then get down to the business of counting things. In the past, this has been an important source of information when it comes to monitoring a web site, but it's a fairly static environment. In the modern world of analytics, we rely on our data not only to provide metrics—how many visitors, abandonment and conversion rates. Yet we also want to use the insights we gain from the data to drive site optimization—to justify changes to the website that positively impact the business.