February 08 2007

[Editorial] New entrant aims to manage UK customer experience

Caravan holiday operator Haven Holidays has adopted technology from TeaLeaf Technology to track how customers use its site. TeaLeaf solutions are already used on 200 sites in the US (70 of which are retail), but this is one of the first installations in the UK - the company launched its UK operation in July 2006.

Haven Holidays, which attracts up to 25,000 visitors a day, is due to be re-launched this month and TeaLeaf Technology "will be instrumental in highlighting any potential usability problems before they reach the customer and will help to identify the most profitable routes to conversion".

The solution from TeaLeaf tracks every interaction a potential customer has with a site and enables the retailer to view a playback of the entire journey and see exactly where a particular person clicked, how they filled in a form, for example, and how long they spent on each page. Because of the visual playback - which is shown as the customer would see the site in their browser, rather than the code which is stored, the system can be used by customer services personnel, for example, when they are on the telephone with a customer.

TeaLeaf gives the example of a financial institution contacted by a customer who has just received their first credit card bill after the introductory rate has expired. The bank would have the assurance of knowing how long the customer spent looking at the terms and conditions on the site, where the expiration of the introductory rate was explained, and be able to say that the customer only looked at them for 1 second, for example.

The system isn't just an insurance policy. Customer Experience Management (CEM) tools like this can provide a complete source of information about a customer's online experience. By tracking in real-time and capturing everything every online customer does, every time, for every unique transaction, and everything the website returns to them as a result, CEM tools can detect unknown obstacles blocking business processes, pinpoints application problems, provides context to customer support to resolve customer calls, provides visibility into usability problems - as well as helping to settle customer disputes. I talked to Marketing VP, Geoff Galat, and UK Country Manager, John Lillie to find out how the system increases customer loyalty and, more importantly, sales.

TeaLeaf's '360-degree view' of the online customer experience, they explained, enables a clear and consistent understanding of the customer for ebusiness, IT, customer service and legal and compliance executives and their organisations across a wide range of vertical industries, including retail.

The system continually monitors every interaction with the website and while this is being recorded, rules can be set to flag up any issues in real-time - rather than changes being highlighted in reports run after-the-event. For instance, the following scenarios could be set to raise an alert.

The conversion rate of a product dropping or increasing dramatically (ie plasma TVs with the wrong price).

Shopping cart abandoned on any orders over £500 - because it works in real-time, the system could link with others so that a click to call button would be displayed, or, if it's a 'platinum customer' they could be called by customer services and the call, if handled correctly, could result in a larger purchase.

Hypothesis testing. A dating service, with an annual subscription of over $200, added an optional $20 magazine subscription to its checkout page. Because customers were thinking about the extra money on top of what was usually a spur of the moment purchase, the company found the number of subscriptions dropped off. Because of the tracking, they were able to see at exactly which point customers decided against the purchase and how long they spent thinking about it. As soon as the magazine offer was removed, conversion rates returned to their normal level.

Q. Wouldn't any problems with the site be highlighted during testing?

Active sites continually introduce new content and logic so in truth it is not possible to fully test a site. The combination of a growing multitude of users, highly personalised and dynamic content and increasingly complex new technology results in a nearly infinite number of navigational options. The vast majority of these are never tested. It simply isn't possible to predict and exercise every potential user scenario.

The TeaLeaf solutions enable IT to reproduce the customer's issue - the exact path and clicks. It also shows what is common about all the users. This can result in a 60 - 90% reduction in the cost of development. If one person has experienced a problem with the site and contacted the retailer to tell them, how many other customers have decided to take their business elsewhere?

In the first 5 days of installation, the system discovered issues with a US travel site which would have resulted in $35 million worth of lost sales (in those 5 days alone).

Q. How is each person's browsing session accessed?

If a specific session needs to be viewed then it can be called up by the customer's name if it has been entered at any part of the process ie. logging on. Otherwise, the operator has to narrow down the search by looking at data and time logs and any other information the 'customer' can provide.

Q. What's the company's background and why have you opened a UK office?

The company has been operating in the UK since July 2006, but had previously won a number of contracts with multinationals with operations in the UK. We now have 6 customers in the UK. The company was founded in the US in November 1999, the first and only independent spin-off of software provider SAP.

Emma Herrod