Posted by Bill Ives

The Web has taken self-service to great new lengths and sometimes new depths. At the same time, the Web is perhaps the only form of business where you can’t actually see or interact with your customers on a personal basis at the point of transaction. This creates a new set of challenges for companies and their online customers so I wanted to share this cross-post from the AppGap. To address this issue, Tealeaf provides aggregated analytics on customer interactions and then offers the ability to drill down to replay and look at individual online transactions for support and analysis. Last week I spoke with Geoff Galat, VP Marketing and Product Strategy at Tealeaf and Shoshana Deutschkron, Senior Manager of Public Relations. I have worked extensively in a past life with customer service in call centers and their monitoring systems. Our conversation brought up many similar and familiar issues. However, now you are dealing with people interacting with systems instead of other people.

With call centers we said that these representatives were the first line face of the firm. Being people, they are not always perfect and it is important to monitor and correct ineffective practices. Now it is software that has become the face of the firm and software will also not always be perfect. However, people expect perfection with web services even more than with people. When they have trouble because the site is not intuitive or has bugs, they get frustrated. When there is no one to talk to they get really frustrated. If there is a person to talk to but that person cannot see what they are doing and they have to get in a major discussion attempting to describe the situation, they get frustrated. This has happened to me many times.

Tealeaf supports both situations. First, there is a customer behavior analysis product suite to look directly at the online experience.

Tealeaf cxImpact provides immediate visibility into what is happening on your web site and can reveal the hidden problems impacting your online business. It helps you detect, quantify, and resolve online customer experience issues.

Tealeaf cxResults provides insight into the complete visitor lifecycle on your web site so you can understand visitor interactions, discover ongoing behavior patterns, and ask and answer questions about your web site experience.

Tealeaf cxView allows executives to stay informed of their most critical customer experience metrics, detect anomalies and take immediate action when any KPI starts to underperform. For example, if successful check outs drop, you see it if is something with the product offering, it self, or with the online software platform, or perhaps the UI that is causing this variance. An example of cxView is seen below.

In addition, there is a product suite that can bring the online experience to call center teams so they can respond to customer inquires about web sites in a more intelligent manner.

Tealeaf cxReveal — Tealeaf cxReveal provides customer service teams with instant, replayable access to both live and recent customer interactions on your web site from any existing CRM console or support portal. Here is a replay that shows the actions the customer took during the session highlighted in green.

Tealeaf cxVerify — Tealeaf cxVerify preserves a complete and permanent record of all customer web site interactions for effective customer dispute resolution, fraud investigations, as well as for audit and compliance requirements.

Tealeaf cxConnect – The Tealeaf cxConnect product line provides integration with business intelligence, analytics and web site optimization solutions for cross-channel and customer behavior analysis.

Tealeaf runs in the background so it is not invasive. There is also no development work required to set it up within a web site. These solutions allow a firm to monitor and catch problems when they first occur before they multiply. You can set up a daily score card on the most important processes, such as login and checkout and detect variances. You can compare today with yesterday or the same day last week or other time periods. Then you can drill down to examples of transactions that occurred within the anomaly. Here is a list of customer sessions being drilled down into for
analysis.

Based on my past experience, I think there are other uses for a tool set like Tealeaf. It would be very useful for product testing and de-bugging errors. In addition, you could do comparative analysis of different approaches. When I was looking at the ROI for a major call center knowledge system, we used the monitoring tool to compare situations where the knowledge system was used and those when it was not used. We found that successful cross-selling tripled with the knowledge system and such metrics as escalations to supervisor and repeat calls on the same issue declined. It seems that Tealeaf solutions could be used for the same type of analysis of web site effectiveness and to compare different features and/or interfaces.

Geoff gave a related example of this type of exploration. He said that one well-known travel site gets half its business through the site and half through call centers. The call center agents use a variation on the same system that is on their site for self-service. Because of the constant use the agents become expert users. So the firm compares this expert use with the use of new users on the self-service system. This helps them identify patterns of use that can help them improve the interface.

I like what Tealeaf brings to customer service. It is another example of the increased transparency found on the Web and helps improve the customer experience.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 9:07 am and is filed under News. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog.