Selecting services for optimising the online user experience

Interview with Paul Cotton from K2uno on Tealeaf solutions

We recently interviewed Paul Cotton, Managing Director of K2uno who are an advanced Business partner of IBM, specialising in applying Tealeaf CEM solutions to optimise the customer experience. One of their solutions is aimed at improving online customer experiences, by providing companies with real-time video information on customer interaction and user journeys; increasing conversion rates, customer retention and ROI for many of its clients.

Find out more from Paul's interview, how this type of approach is helping companies and his tips on improving the customer experiences.

Q. How can a solution such as Tealeaf improve online customer experiences.

Tealeaf improves online experience in a number of ways. Almost anyone who has transacted online can recite stories of frustration, where they weren’t able to do what they set out to do. Page errors, navigation issues, slow responses and payment failure are just a few of the issues that site visitors or mobile app users encounter regularly.

Traditional analytics can tell you when and where the customer abandoned, but often can’t show you why.

Companies that use Tealeaf are able to view in real-time, or replay, the user’s session exactly as they experienced it, as if filmed by a camera over their shoulder. This means that many obstacles – undetectable by quantitative analytics – can be detected, seen through the customer’s eyes and eliminated.

Q. Give examples of how companies of the commercial benefits and explain how site revenue has been increased.

Tealeaf is used extensively by the largest online retailers, banks, insurers, travel companies and gaming companies to eliminate online struggle. It has been shown to increase conversion rates by 3.5% or more, i.e. if a retailer was converting 5% of site hits into sales, this has increased to 8.5%. The impact on revenue is obvious. It has also been shown to increase customer retention by at least 1% as their online experiences improve.

Also, it allows businesses to measure the impact of any given issue because it knows exactly how many users were affected. The result is a 60% reduction in IT resolution costs.

Q. What alternatives are there to Tealeaf for smaller companies and how do they differ?

Whilst there are no like-for-like products on the market that capture the entire customer experience, and all data exchanged, there are other products that are page-tag solutions. ClickTale for example, is a product that allows companies to look at user interactions, where they clicked, conduct form analytics and heat-map analysis.

The main difference is that Page-tag based solutions miss anything specific displayed to that user such as personalisation, an application issue (like an error) or data behind a login.

Without seeing the actual customer experience most customer obstacles will not be visible which limits the effectiveness of page tag based solutions.

Q4. What best practices do you think are important to running this type of customer-experience improvement project?

The first step is to map out all of your customer journeys and understand their impact on existing business processes. One technique used by Tealeaf users is to run “Movie Nights” where marketing, e-Commerce, business and customer insight teams get together to review recordings of user sessions where problems occurred.

The insight gained allows the business to set up tracking for future occurrences of a similar issue, set tolerances for key KPI’s and proactively recover sales by having their call centre staff engage with users at the point where they are struggling, not some time down the line.

Which special considerations are needed for reviewing tablet and smartphone platforms with this sort of service.

This is an extremely important issue as Developers are no longer creating solutions for a mouse, but for the “width of a finger”. Users actually expect more from mobile interactions, at least in terms of simplicity. Tealeaf has mobile customer experience management at the centre of its strategy with its cxMobile module.

This allows Tealeaf users to be able to replay every zoom, pitch, click or tilt – exactly as the user interacted. The insight is invaluable for application designers, whether developing a hybrid app, native app or mobile website.

Thanks to Paul Cotton for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Paul Cotton is the Managing Director of K2uno Ltd.. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.