To understand how to deliver better online solutions and provide more effective online service for your customers, you need a shared 'view' of the online customer across the organization — this is Customer Experience Management (CEM).
Leading customer-centric organizations choose Tealeaf's CEM solutions because only Tealeaf has the most complete dataset of customer experience information.
From ebusiness and IT, to customer service and compliance, only Tealeaf provides the visibility, insight and answers required to explore opportunities for improvement and innovation, drive requirements and set priorities.
The Problem
The web and ebusiness have matured into robust, powerful components of the modern economy; however, with rapid application deployment, increasingly complex environments, and dynamic functionality, customers fail in their online experiences at alarming rates. This level of failure has landed on mainstream publications includingThe Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, Business Week, and the Financial Times.
Businesses are challenged to understand these online issues because their sites ultimately deliver their 'storefront' or marketplace into the one place they cannot see — the browser of the customer. That challenge has led to startling levels of customer complaints and massive business impact.
A 2007 Harris Interactive® poll on customer behavior reveals a high level of consumer intolerance for ecommerce failures and the double threat that these failures present to online businesses. This survey illustrates an alarming rate of web site issues—with nine out of 10 consumers experiencing difficulties online. To make matters worse, the same survey reports that 42 percent of consumers abandon their transactions when they experience online road blocks or simply switch to a competitor.
In addition, the same survey uncovers a second threat to your business. Customer service centers are ill equipped to respond effectively to the needs of online customers. This poor level of service triggers a second wave of customer abandonment. Of consumers polled, 49 percent of those who contacted customer service after experiencing an online issue did not have the issue resolved, and a whopping 52 percent stopped doing business with the company as a result. Between web site glitches and bad customer service, an estimated $50 billion in potential consumer transactions are at risk throughout the remainder of this decade, in just the retail and travel industries alone.
The same survey also shows that 85 percent of users expected their online experiences to be the same as offline, where every user can complete every transaction, every time. While many companies believe they are delivering adequate online experiences, their customers are in pain. Why do most organizations miss the mark?
The Challenge
Running an online channel forces rapid, yet often incomplete, application deployment. Use cases become "best guesses" as customers use the web in unstructured ways. And testing is insufficient. You can't possibly test for every thing that customers could do, as their unique data that makes every interaction is different.
The fact that the web reduces a two-way interaction between a business and its customer to nothing more than a datastream is both wonderful for reach, scalability, and profitability and challenging because it forces companies into a disconnection, as they no longer are able to be face-to-face with their most valuable asset, their customers. Really, the web is the first form of business where this disconnection exists. And when customers' expectations are not met, the business is at a competitive disadvantage.
Lack of visibility into these problems is the core starting point of Customer Experience Management. It is the first step in helping you solve such difficult questions as:
- Why are conversion rates down?
- Why are site visits up, but order sizes are down?
- Why do we constantly get complaints about service from our customers when all metrics appear good?
These questions are hard to answer because of the insufficiencies of many adjacent tools and their lack of insight. Executives use web analytics, systems metrics, performance reports, and call logs to try and answer these questions. But simply giving you data about "what is happening" on your site is very insufficient at bridging between those metrics and the actual customers' experiences. Data points about customers cannot replace the qualitative layer of analysis—what did the customer actually see and do, and why?
The Solution: Visibility. Insight. Answers.
Visibility is the missing link between your business and your customers. In the context of Customer Experience Management, visibility is defined as the ability to see your customers — every one of their unique interactions with your site, for every customer, every single time. If you can capture what the customer saw and did, and what your site's response was, you can fill the gap that exists today.
Once you have captured all of that data, the key is to expose relevant information — insight. Insight must be in the form of qualitative analysis. When you ask "why are conversion rates down today?" isn't the most relevant answer found in customers' actions, to understand not only where they abandoned, but why they did not convert?
Finally, once you have the visibility, and the insight, the next step is to make that insight actionable — answers. Answers to the questions you have and the ability to rapidly isolate and eliminate anything that is forcing those customers to abandon. By understanding not only where abandonment occurs, but also why, you can remove the obstacles that get in too many customer's way, successfully completing more transactions, improving conversion rates and retaining more customers through better service, just as they expect.
