Revamping your customers’ online experience

Internet usage is increasing rapidly throughout Europe, so it’s no surprise that this has given rise to a surge in online shopping. Research shows that UK internet sales increased to a record UK£4.2 billion (€5.2 billion) in July 2007 (Source: IMRG, August 2007) and dramatically, uSwitch predicts that online retail will account for as much as 40 percent of all UK retails sales by 2020.

However, the findings of a 2007 survey from Tealeaf and Harris Interactive suggest that online retailers could increase online sales even more. The study revealed that nine out of 10 UK consumers had experienced an issue with an online transaction. The business impact of these site obstacles is significant with 37 percent of users who experience issues permanently switching to a competitor or abandoning the transaction entirely. It is clear that users are no longer willing to accept intermittent or confusing website experiences.

The challenge
The fact that the web reduces a two-way interaction between a business and its customer to nothing more than a datastream is wonderful for reach, scalability, and profitability, but at the same time particularly challenging because companies are no longer able to interact in a face-to-face environment with their most valuable asset: their customers.

When customers' expectations are not met, the competition is just a click away, so to effectively compete in the online world, businesses must focus on improving the online customer experience. Obtaining visibility of everything that happens on your website enables businesses to ask questions such as: Why are conversion rates down, or why are site visits up, but order values down?

But identifying the right questions is only the first step. How do you find the answers? Many companies use web analytics, systems metrics, performance reports, and call logs to try and answer these questions. But data about "what is happening" on a site is only the beginning – you need to know why it is happening in order to make a change to the customer experience. Data points about customers cannot replace the qualitative layer of analysis – what did the customer actually see and do, and most importantly why?

Improving customer experience on Thomson.co.uk
A number of businesses are now taking the issue of website insight very seriously. A recent Forrester survey of 287 customer experience decision-makers from large US firms found that 91 percent said customer experience would be either very important or critical to their 2008 efforts. In the UK, Thomson Travel, the leading holiday booking website, has been tackling the online experience of their customers head-on through their use of Tealeaf’s Customer Experience Management solution.

Tealeaf empowers Thomson with visibility into every action a visitor makes on the website and alerts the team to any areas that are preventing customers from completing bookings. Thomson can then investigate what is happening; quantify how many customers are being affected; the business impact; and fix the problem. Because of these features, Thomson has eliminated errors that would have been difficult for the broader e-commerce teams to identify or even reproduce, by pulling up the exact session where a customer problem occurred and viewing it in real-time. Incredibly, Thomson experienced a 100 percent return on investment within the first three months of using Tealeaf.

The Solution
As Thomson found, visibility is the missing link between an online business and a customer. In the context of Customer Experience Management, visibility is defined as the ability to see customers  – every one of their unique interactions with a site, for every customer, every single time. Once the data is captured, the key is exposing relevant information: insight. Once the visibility and insight is in place, the next step is to make sure that problems are solved quickly. By understanding not only where and why abandonment occurs, you can remove the obstacles preventing completed transactions, improve conversion rates and retain more customers through better service, just as they expect.

About Geoff Galat
He is VP Marketing and Product Strategy at Tealeaf where is is responsible for overseeing marketing and product management at Tealeaf. Galat has more than 18 years’ experience in technology marketing, most recently as Vice President of Marketing and Product Management at Tumbleweed Communications, evangelising the use of the Internet as a channel for secure messaging and communications.