TeaLeaf Provides Insight Into Website Activity

"Most companies have a big blind spot, and that is, what are customers experiencing online?" says Geoff Galat, vice president of TeaLeaf Technology. In a syndrome he calls "death by a thousand cuts," a small, unknown problem on a company's web site could over time accumulate into huge amounts of lost business.

TeaLeaf (originally an SAP spinoff) this week introduced TeaLeaf CX, an upgraded and expanded version of its core technology, which records web sessions in a searchable fashion, so that when a customer experiences a problem, you can go in and "look at the tea leaves" by viewing all the same web pages the customer did (including error messages and seeing just what the customer typed in). One new module, cxImpact, lets you analyze the clickstream data in various ways so that you can identify issues and trends. One insurance company's website had a problem accepting vehicle identification numbers -- when customers added spaces their applications were rejected. When the company analyzed its sessions using TeaLeaf data, it discovered why the mistake happened -- people were typing in dashes that appeared on their forms and the field was formatted for only numbers -- and that it had lost, on average, six policies a day for a year. So not only were customers unhappy but millions of dollars worth of business had been lost by one faulty field. As companies add complexity and Ajax applications to their websites to make them more interactive and Web 2.0-ready, these types of problems are likely to loom larger -- for instance, how can you know what's going on in the mini applications you deliver to the customer's desktop? (TeaLeaf can track it.) cxImpact provides bar charts, pie charts and other such standard reports. cxConnect reformats the website data into web logs or XML or pours it into a relational database so that it can be interpreted by a heavier-duty, outside business intelligence or web analytics tool. The analytics and stored sessions can be used together, so when the numbers suggest a problem, you can view the actual pages customer input to confirm or deny the hypothesis. cxReveal gives customer service reps access to live and archived customer sessions, so that as they're speaking to a customer on the phone, they can see exactly what obstacle the customer hit. Another module, cxVerify, stores completed transactions for resolution purposes -- if a customer says they didn't buy ABC stock for $6.10, you can send them their web session, packaged in a PDF, and say, "but yes, you did." The recording shows the full web pages, what the customer entered or clicked on, and the amount of time the person spent on that page. The suite starts around $80,000.