Related Topics:
			Business Research: Contact Center, Customer Performance Technology Research: Business Intelligence Imperative Research: Business Innovation, Process Improvement Vendor Research: AIM Technology, Cerebit, ClickFox, CustomerSat, Enkata, Envision, Graham Technology, HardMetrics, Informiam, Inova Solutions, Intelligent Results, KnoahSoft, Latigent, MediaTrac, Merced Systems, Oracle, Portrait Software, Queplix, ResponseTek, Responsys, Salesforce.com, Saratoga Systems, Symmetrics, Tealeaf, unica
			Printer friendly version Email this article Send feedback to editor

Summary
Benchmark research recently completed by Ventana Research shows that 43 percent of organizations have deployed a form of Web-based self-service for customers, and 56 percent of organization executives said self-service is at the top of their list for planned new channels of interaction with customers. Therefore, we expect self-service to play an increasingly important role in customers’ overall experiences of dealing with organizations. But the rate at which customers attempting to transact business over the Web give up for one reason or another has remained both high and largely unchanged over the last 10 years, showing that customers are far from happy with their experiences in attempting to use the Web for activities such as buying products or services. As a result, organizations are missing out on potentially large volumes of new business. Their challenge is to understand what the customer actually experiences and what they can do to improve it and increase success rates by doing so. To help them, Tealeaf Technology’s software provides not only insight into what customers attempt to do on their Web sites but also recommendations on how to improve their experiences.

Assessment
Access to affordable broadband services is widespread now, and with it more customers are willing to do business online. There are therefore good reasons why organizations want to use the Web as a channel for sales and service: Reducing one-to-one interactions with contact center agents and thereby saving operational costs are key among them. But in this scenario, customers are more remote from the organization, which makes it harder to understand their preferences, their experiences using the Web site and the reasons why they fail to complete purchases. Traditional Web analytics systems have been cumbersome to implement, requiring considerable enhancements to existing Web management software, and while they are good at answering questions about what customers attempted, they have been less able to uncover what actually occurred and why high volumes of transactions fail to result in new business.

Tealeaf has developed proprietary techniques that address these issues. Tealeaf CX Capture is an unintrusive tool that sits in the user organization’s network and captures in real time transactions from Web and application servers and from databases. During the initial system setup, Tealeaf’s professional services representatives work with the organization’s business analysts and users to interpret these transactions as part of business processes and then configure the CX Datastore to store the data in an appropriate format. CX Datastore can store various types of transactions and events from the Web, as well as selected transactions from application servers and databases.

Four products sit on top of CX Datastore to support different business requirements. CX View provides insight into what customers attempt to transact on the Web site and analysis of the business impact and the overall customer experience. CX Impact allows organizations to identify customers’ issues and decide how to resolve them. CX Reveal makes the Web transcripts, including actual shots of the pages used, inputs and outputs, available to contact center agents so in responding to customer queries they can see exactly what the customer attempted and what the outcomes were. CX Verify supports resolving customer disputes and can help detect events such as attempted fraudulent use of the site. A fifth product, CX Connect, makes data held in CX Datastore available for analysis by third-party products to support business and customer-focused analysis, including detailed analysis of customer behaviors and their Web-based experiences.

Market Impact
Several products on the market provide basic Web analytics. Most are cumbersome to implement because they require tagging all the lines of code that manage the site. Their outputs also are limited to showing only what users did. Tealeaf’s products, in contrast, can capture Web data without extensive tagging. CX Capture doesn’t require changes to the Web management software and works by capturing transactions as they occur. U.K.-based speed-trap also has removed the need for line-by-line tagging but does require some code to be inserted in the existing software. For analysis and reporting, speed-trap has teamed with SAS in the U.K., whereas Tealeaf provides these features as part of its own integrated product suite. Products that go beyond simple Web analytics are still new, but Tealeaf has taken an early lead in providing insights into how organizations’ Web-based services are performing and how they impact the customer experience.

Recommendation
Along with the contact center and the ways in which agents handle customers, an organization’s Web site and the services it supports are key determinants of the customer experience. In the same way that a bad experience with an agent can cause a customer to leave, so can a failed attempt to transact business on the Web. Ventana Research recommends that companies wanting to improve their customers’ Web experiences, and to gain more business as a result, consider how Tealeaf can support such initiatives.