Tealeaf: Experience Your Customers

Tealeaf Best Practice #4: Mission Impossible? Empowering the Call Center to Capture Untapped Revenue While Improving Customer Satisfaction

By Denise Jack, Director of Best Practices —



Traditionally, online businesses have considered their customer service organizations only as cost centers. That's why many call center experts still claim that the best customer service organizations are the ones that exceed in metrics like call handle time and first call resolution. But what if you can position your customer service team as a strategic asset that can generate revenue as well?

Our most innovative customers are doing just that with Tealeaf. Having recently met with several companies that have deployed Tealeaf within their call centers, I've seen a lot of progress in this area. I've seen call centers in which the agents are using Tealeaf to not only service customers who call in with a specific website issue or inquiry, but also dedicated call center teams that do proactive and targeted outreach to customers who have expressed an intent to make a purchase or book a reservation online but ultimately did not complete the transaction. Using Tealeaf to understand who those customers are and what they were trying to do on the website, these outbound agents aren’t cold calling customers but instead provide an exceptional level of customer service because they understand the customer's intent and interest.

Netflights.com (a brand of Gold Medal Travel and part of the Thomas Cook Group) is a leading UK travel company that has done quite well with this practice in their contact center. Using Tealeaf, Gold Medal Travel set up alerts for customers who have certain basket values and dropped off during the reservation process—e.g., credit card failures or being stuck in a loop. Within seconds of such a website customer struggle occurring, the outbound team receives the customers' session information to an outbound team in the contact center. The outbound agent contacts the customer immediately to attempt to complete the sale over the phone. With the help of this visibility into the online experience, this outbound team now delivers more revenue per hour than any other reservation group at Gold Medal—adding up to nearly $24M annually. The order recovery process now represents 20% of all revenue generated from netflights.com. To read more about Netflights.com, check out the case study.

If your contact center organization is viewed by the business as a pure cost center, consider this strategy as a way to help your business drive additional revenue and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty along the way.

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 to Take Action on Voice of Customer Insights

By Bonny Evans, Best Practices Manager —

Do you use the customer feedback gathered by your Voice of Customer (VOC) program to identify issues with your website? If so, ask yourself… how much of the feedback you receive is directly actionable? Are you able to identify opportunities to improve your online customer experience? It can be a challenge to identify next steps from customer feedback alone. While VOC provides a measure of how well your online customer experience is meeting your customer's needs and feedback that can indicate areas where visitors encounter obstacles on your site, the level of detail in the feedback is not typically enough to act without additional information.



Before I came to Tealeaf, I worked for a customer experience management company where a part of my focus was VOC analytics. I regularly came across companies where their feedback data indicated how difficult their site was to use, but did not convey details about the usability issue in a manner that could be acted on directly. So implementing an effective site redesign effort to improve that aspect of the online customer experience was much easier said than done.

Using Tealeaf in combination with your VOC program will enable you to take action on this customer feedback. There are a few steps you can take to not only understand usability issues, problems on the site and areas of customer struggle, but to also set a course of action. Here are some steps to get started:

Establish Customer Struggle KPIs, Part II

By Wendy Roth, Education Manager —

In my earlier post on establishing customer struggle Key Performance Indicator (KPI) scorecards, I discussed some of the ways you can determine what kinds of struggle are important to track on your mobile or desktop web site. Once you know what kinds of struggles you want to monitor, building a KPI scorecard to monitor them in Tealeaf is surprisingly easy.

A KPI scorecard, for example, can measure the percentage of visitors who struggle performing a basic activity, and lets you monitor if that struggle is greater than the thresholds you set for that activity. Let's look at a sample KPI report:



For each KPI, you must first determine what the base activity is, and then the events that indicate struggle. The base activity depends on what you'd like to measure, which varies by industry and website purpose. In this example, I am monitoring what percentage of my customers experience a struggle during the checkout process. My base activity, therefore, is a count of all the visitors who started the checkout process, counted just once per visitor.

Set Up KPIs to Track Your Holiday Customer Behavior

By Denise Jack, Director of Best Practices —

The latest in our Best Practices series, this post offers a suggestion for how to make Tealeaf users more successful. With the holidays quickly approaching, online retailers are working around the clock to ensure that their websites are ready to support all the customers who will be looking for the best deals on the latest gadgets, toys and maybe even those dreaded holiday sweaters. Come to think of it, the holiday season is a busy time for any number of other industries as well. To illustrate my point, however, I'll use the example of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can help retailers monitor their websites to ensure that they provide optimal online experiences to those hungry holiday shoppers.

To start, remember that KPIs are meant to summarize meaningful and comparative data. They should also drive critical action when you observe a KPI trending in a way that may indicate customer struggle. Finally, KPIs should be grouped with a particular audience or focus in mind. For example, a marketing executive might not care to see a KPI on occurrence of 500 errors as much as seeing a KPI that indicates which holiday promotion campaigns are the most successful in driving conversion.

With Tealeaf, KPI scorecards give you the ability to easily group these KPIs so that they can be reported and presented for an analyst to gain awareness of any potential problems and drill down into further analysis. Going back to the holiday promotion campaign example, if the marketing team has created a targeted email campaign offering different coupon codes for their customer segments, I would suggest creating a KPI scorecard on the following:

Proactive Customer Listening AKA Movie Night

By Bonny Evans, Best Practices Manager —

The latest in our Best Practices series, this post offers a suggestion for how to make Tealeaf users more successful. Break out the liquorice and soda and let's have a night at the movies! I've always enjoyed getting together with a group of friends to watch a good movie. The movie itself is usually fun enough, but what makes the experience truly rewarding is what happens after the movie has ended—the ensuing interactions stemming from our shared experience. We may exchange our thoughts and opinions about a particular movie scene as we exit the theater, or comment about the special effects, and of course, sometimes there are those really memorable movie lines that'll stay with us as we quote them time and again.

Well it turns out that these movie nights aren't just for Hollywood productions—you can also host them to watch how your customers interact with your website.

The concept of "movie nights" is one of our Tealeaf best practice approaches to proactive customer listening. Conducting "movie nights" is a simple but powerful way to uncover opportunities to improve your customer's experience, regardless of whether you're new to Tealeaf or a veteran user. Leverage Tealeaf as the common platform for bringing together team members from across your company and facilitating communication about website issues and site optimization opportunities.