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

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.

Free the Data

In today's all digital world, there is a never ending onslaught of data. For example, in 2007, it's estimated that there are 20 million users getting their email on wireless devices(i.e. Phones, PDA's, etc). This number is estimated to grow to 350 million users by 2010.

Whether it's email, digital pictures, mobile transactions or just 'more data', the critical business problem is:

'The Information Value Chain' - allowing companies to share and understand data to support better decision making. In other words, more data makes your SAN salesperson very happy, transforming that data into actionable information allows your business to prosper.

Data is a lot like milk. Being the nerd that I am, I don't really care for milk, but I do like pizza which requires the transformation of milk into cheese. Left untreated or cared for, milk spoils and creates a stench. 

So, what does this have to do with Customer Experience Management, and Tealeaf?
Tealeaf creates a lot of data -- we need it to power a visual replay of a user's web session. However, just as there are milk consumers, soda-pop consumers and pizza eaters our customers have different needs for Tealeaf data -- and different processes for turning the data into valuable information. Some folks need a snippet of the data in real-time, others need a full forensic interface to the data. How do we keep everybody happy?

Here's an interesting example of how to leverage the value of Tealeaf data: Does the tail wag the dog, or does the dog wag the tail?

The convergence of Web 2.0, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and EDA (Event Driven Architecture) are causing some interesting changes in the application development, deployment and monitoring spaces.
In classical engineering education, we are taught the concepts of feedback loops. We study how an airplane adjusts its course by determining its location and how far off course it may be. The following sentence is always the word of caution to 'not adjust course too often', otherwise you induce the plane into instability and crash.

Today's applications are being built with the notion of an information highway. The applications, consume, generate and transform information put onto the 'bus', i.e. the highway. Not only do the application components inter-operate via the highway and its associated on/off ramps, the application monitoring and diagnostic tools also make use of this common infrastructure. Remember Field of Dreams, 'If you build it, they will come.'

In a Web 2.0 world, subroutine calls have been replaced by HTTP/HTTPS invocations. The abstraction of HTTP/HTTPS allows for components to operate anywhere -- and not just within a single computer or single network. This integration/disintegration can occur at any spot on the highway -- i.e. it can take place during the page creation or it can take place within the user's browser. In plainer words, content aggregation can take place either on the server or on the client.  Welcome to the world of Mashups (Wikipedia).

During the Internet Bubble, few things were as wildly hyped as Personalization and the touted ability to customize each and every user's online experience. The reality didn't quite match the hype and/or the cost outweighed the benefit -- however I feel this class of 'feedback' coming back -- albeit with a new infrastructure.

Just what does it take to influence somebody's behavior?

• Is it a billboard for a gas station when your car is approaching empty?
• Is it the offer for help when your car has a dead battery in the airport parking lot?

It's the right data at the right time
Have you ever noticed that many of the internet acronyms (SOA, EDA) are 3 letter abbreviations for 'now', as in I want it 'now'. All of this data flowing, oozing and cruising down the highway needs to be analyzed and acted on in real-time as well as new applications and application flows constructed dynamically.
With the technology stack that we now have, we can even change the behavior of an application without changing the structure of the underlying application.

On the Tealeaf website, we say:
See your online customers...Capturing the details of every single interaction, Tealeaf delivers insights that explain why your customers succeed or fail in their transactions.

In the past, we would have talked about our ability to discover sessions, to replay them and/or to score them/evaluate them. With the latest Tealeaf release -- we can do more -- we can influence the app itself and build a foundation to leverage applications dynamically.

We now have an API to send the data out of Tealeaf in real-time. We can send our view of the application that we are monitoring back onto the information highway. For lack of better terms, we call this the 'Event Bus.' As web 2.0 applications started using RIA(Rich Internet Application) Frameworks such as Ajax, Flex and Flash -- we've also evolved our data collection capability. While the bulk of our data is collected passively via a server side packet sniffer, we now complement that view with methods to see what's happening inside of the browser. Initially we did this work in order to power replay of Ajax applications.

Our hooks for capturing activity from inside the browser come from including some simple JavaScript on the page. Ordinarily, the JavaScript collects client-side activity and asynchronously posts this information using an Ajax call. What happens when there is an intelligent listener to this Ajax posts? This opens up a channel to talk back to the user's browser. Utilizing this mechanism, we could dynamically offer:

• Chat or customer assistance to people who appear to be lost or who are having unproductive sessions.
• Surveys or other forms of customer follow-up.
• Targeted offers based on activity.
• Detection of fraudulent behavior and

I am not suggesting that Tealeaf will enter the 'spaces' described above -- but that our data, analysis and infrastructure can be used to power and partner these application solutions to deliver additional value.

Clearly, Tealeaf is not the only vendor working to exploit opportunities that are arising from the 'Now paradigm' -- load balancers from F5 and Cisco now have full external API's that can be used by the applications themselves. There's even the potential of browser bloat as every vendor of chat, click-to-call, survey offer, etc want to get their own JavaScript stack embedded into your application. It's not just the code -- these hooks also need to talk to a server taking up more resources, etc. The analytics companies are also feeling the tension to perform real-time analysis.

I am suggesting that the Tealeaf infrastructure makes building these class of applications a lot easier and will enable more robust interactions.  It's been said that 'There's a thin line between love and hate', there's also a thin line between application monitoring and feedback -- Welcome to the new world order.

What's worth more, an ounce of insight or a pound of data?

Free the data, let it be used to produce the insight that you need.

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

New Twists in Capturing the Online User Experience

When people ask me, what Tealeaf does, I usually respond that Tealeaf provides needed visibility into what's actually happening on a web site. I typically give the analogy that Tealeaf allows you to see/understand the experience of each and every user on a website as if you had a camera over the shoulder of each and every user.

• What happens when the user experience goes across multiple web sites and multiple companies?
• How can this happen?
• Is this a mashup, SOA, a train wreck or opportunity?

Let's start with a simple example:

An online retailer chooses to outsource their catalog search function. When the user hits 'Search', the search functionality is mapped via a DNS Lookup(Cname) to an outsourced service provider. The ASP (Application Service Provider) returns complete pages of HTML content. Only when the user clicks on an item is the user returned back to the online retailer's actual web site. The user of the web site is completely unaware that they have traveled between web sites and company borders. We like to say that on the Web, your competitor is only 1 click away -- however the power of making 'subroutine calls' via HTTP means that any service or service provider is even less than a click away.

In the extreme sense, this is like driving down the highway and you enter a long tunnel. No lights are in the tunnel and your car's headlights are not operating. This is clearly not a good situation. Search is an integral part of the online shopping experience -- how can I not have Tealeaf level of visibility to the search navigation and content? What happens if the external search content is misleading, broken or confusing? How would the site owner become aware of these issues and fix them?

How do you overcome this problem?

Do you go to using 'multiple cameras' -- one per company and join the data streams -- or is there a better way?

At first glance, the multiple camera story sounds good -- it's just an extension of normal tealeaf. However, this will result in data capture in multiple data centers, requires installation of hardware across multiple companies and data centers and all sorts of other management headaches.

Should people shy away from utilizing 3rd party services as part of their application flow -- I don't think that we can easily close Pandora's box here -- the potential value is too high -- this 'issue' will not easily go away.

So, is there a better way to capture the complete user experience using a single camera?

We could capture from inside the user's browser. While this would be 'one camera' -- it would also be 1 camera per user -- so this would not be too good a solution.

Why not capture using the same techniques that enabled this class of application in the first place? Many people feel that all computer science problems can be solved with an additional level of indirection -- so here goes. Instead of just using the 'DNS remap' i.e. CNAME (DNS Alias) to allow services to be located anywhere, can we setup a common access point through which all content flows? In plainer terms, can we 'proxy' the request to the search application so that all content flows past a single inspection point, i.e. 1 camera. Such a proxy would introduce minimal latency and give the needed visibility at a minimal TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

If you have complete visibility to the Mashup/SOA application stack -- then you can deploy with confidence -- and deliver better applications faster.

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

Compliance and the Web

In the past months, Cisco acquired Ironport, Autonomy acquired Zantaz and most recently, Google acquired Postini. The acquired companies all were involved with email scanning, archiving and compliance. In today's digital world, there are multiple regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley(SOX), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), Gramm-Leach-Biley (GLB) which govern the creation, distribution and management of corporate records and communications.

Email is an interesting case -- since email serves as a substitute for a conversation (i.e. a phone call) as well as a permanent record (like a printed document).

I would strongly suggest that a web site, particularly a transactional web site is another form of communication which should be treated the same as email when it comes to the need for compliance.

A Web transaction is a bi-directional conversation between the end user and the company. During this conversation, items such as terms and conditions are presented, product suitability, price and more are exchanged. Since this content is dynamic and changing (i.e. price is a condition, not a lookup, stock trades depend on market conditions -- price, availability) it must be captured and made available in the same fashion as an email.

We take it for granted that your "Call May be monitored for legal or productivity reasons", that "Your email will be archived", when will your call with the virtual agent (i.e. the Website) be recorded as well for compliance?

--Robert Wenig, Founder & Chief Technology Officer

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