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When the Customer Isn't Right: Protect Your Business from Fraud

2012-01-24T13:19:11-08:00

By Wendy Roth, Education Manager —

For some companies, going to great lengths to satisfy customers is the stuff legends are made of. I'm sure you've heard of the department store that accepts the return of a shirt that is not only old and worn, but that wasn't even sold at the store. When every negative tweet can grow to be a PR disaster, it can seem easier to just give in and say the customer is always right.

But what if the customer isn't right? Or isn't even a customer, for that matter? In the old days, thieves had to actually go to the bank because that's where the money was. But nowadays, they can steal money from your business without even leaving their living rooms.

So how do you distinguish semi-legitimate customers with a shirt to return from the real thieves? Here's how three businesses used Tealeaf to identify and limit fraud on their websites:

Understand Fraud Patterns
A major bank had identified IP addresses they knew were attempting fraudulent activity. The question they wanted to answer is what were these fraudsters doing or trying to do? Their analytics tools helped them to figure out that fraudulent attempts were taking place but they didn’t know how.

By using Tealeaf replay, the bank was able to see both the fraudulent behavior and to identify patterns that characterized fraud. They could then use those patterns to identify other, previously unknown offending IP addresses and discover other impacted accounts.

As a result, the fraud group saw significant improvement in fraud containment. Adding Tealeaf to all web applications has become mission-critical due to the additional intelligence that Tealeaf provides the fraud group.

Verify Discrepancies
When it comes time to plan a vacation, a few customers of a prominent online travel company thought that good prices were not quite good enough. These customers would call in and complain that the rate they were charged didn't match what was displayed on the website.

Before Tealeaf, when a customer called in with a dispute the customer service representative (CSR) had to take the customer's word, and as a result, the company lost thousands of dollars a day in credits or refunds.

By giving their CSRs access to Tealeaf, for the first time, the travel company could investigate what the customer actually saw and did at the time of booking, and see how far reality might have strayed from the customer's account of the transaction. Armed with the facts, the CSR could choose to approve or deny refunds on a case-by-case basis, saving thousands daily.

Identify Fraud in Real-time
A financial services company couldn't wait for forensics to reveal possible evidence of fraud after the perpetrators had come and gone; they wanted to be alerted while it was occurring. So they used Tealeaf Events to pull data from forms users submitted and compared that data to previous loan applications and fraud watch lists. As a result, they saw a significant improvement in their ability to detect fraud. In addition, they were able to identify other site issues and determine their causes.

With the rapid growth of online business channels—including mobile—the stakes continue to rise. By being vigilant and leveraging fraud detection and dispute resolution solutions such as Tealeaf cxVerify, you won't lose your shirt keeping your real customers satisfied.

Tealeaf's New Year Resolutions for 2012

2012-01-19T12:29:52-08:00

By Janet Jaiswal, Senior Director of Product Marketing —

Earlier this week we gave some suggested New Year's resolutions for retailers on how to improve their mobile channels. It got us thinking that perhaps we ought to have some resolutions of our own.

As we reflect on what we've achieved and what we've learned from our customers, analysts and industry colleagues in 2011, we are energized as we look forward to the year ahead of us. We expect that even more companies will realize the importance of providing a well-integrated customer experience across channels—mobile, website, through a contact center or other channels such as Voice of Customer.

Without any further ado, here's our list of resolutions for 2012:

We resolve to provide even more thought leadership for the CEM industry — Last year, we kicked off our thought leadership efforts with regular blogs on a variety of topics. Look for posts on topics such as Mobile, Best Practices, HTML5, Usability and industry-specific issues in the area of customer experience management.

We resolve to help our customers implement even more best practices — One of the ways companies can realize faster benefits from Tealeaf is to start with reports and templates that are specific to their industries and processes. These reports are based on working with hundreds of leading companies across many industries. In 2012, will expand the number of industries for these reports and templates. To help users share their experiences and obtain onsite training we will hold user group conferences—we will host our EMEA customer forum in May and our user group conference in July.

We resolve an intuitive and easy-to-use solution that will drive business value — With the launch of Tealeaf Version 8.x, there has been a dramatic improvement in the Tealeaf user interface as well as functionality such as ad-hoc analysis, rich internet application support, drag-and-drop reporting and the ability to keep an eye on key trends with Top Movers & Driver features.

We resolve that companies will receive even more benefits with Tealeaf — Last year, Forrester created a new Total Economic Impact (TEI) analysis—similar to an ROI model—for our Customer Service Optimization suite. Combined with the TEI for our Customer Behavior Analysis suite, this helps companies understand the benefits they can expect to receive from our products. We are pleased to know that some companies achieve even higher returns than what the TEI model shows.

We resolve to help more companies move through the Tealeaf Maturity Model — Our goal is to help companies move to a more proactive mode of operation, where all digital channels are integrated when it comes to providing a great customer experience.

We vow to provide excellent support to our customers — We will continue to provide responsive and helpful support via our portal, email and/or phone to our customers during their business hours in all the key countries in which we operate. In addition, we have enhanced the features available from our community portal, ViaTealeaf, so our customers can more easily find videos, documentation and tools to help them maximize the benefits of using Tealeaf.

A Few Mobile-Focused New Year's Resolutions for Retailers

2012-01-17T06:01:00-08:00

By Bob Dever, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing —

Now that the wrapping paper has been recycled, we'd like to suggest a few new year's resolutions for retail executives who want to make the most of their fastest growing digital channel—mobile commerce. These suggestions are based, in part, on the results of the advanced social media analysis we commissioned over the 2011 holiday season:

Focus on ease of use. Only a small percentage of mobile users feel the ease of use is what they'd expect. That means there's a huge opportunity to make ease of use a competitive advantage, whether for mobile sites or apps. Because of the limited real estate on phone screens, retailers must be as contextual as possible in what they display. It's important to make the shopper's path as easy to navigate as possible.
Listen. Consumers have many ways of telling retailers (and everyone else) what works and what doesn't—app store reviews, Twitter, Facebook, etc. These consumers are sharing critical information. To improve in mobile retailers need to be open to learning and optimizing based on customer feedback.
Move from doing things because they are cool to doing things that help customers buy on mobile devices. Think twice before opting for complex processes and always consider a mobile service from the customer's perspective. For instance, consider implementing forms that shift orientation from vertical to horizontal in order to enable easier data entry.
Understand that the mobile channel is different. To ensure their customers are evangelists instead of naysayers, retailers need a clear understanding of the reality of the mobile experience they provide. They need to uncover the sources of customer struggle and quickly remedy them before additional users are affected. Remember, mobile devices lead to new behaviors—like rotating screens, swiping and varying “folds.” It’s important to correlate customer behaviors with device type in order to pinpoint device-specific issues.

To make 2012 a banner year for your mobile commerce, it's time to tune in to your mobile customers and take a proactive approach to addressing the things that can cause them to struggle across this rapidly growing channel.

Mobile: What's Important to Measure and Why

2012-01-12T12:55:11-08:00

By Melissa Juan, Mobile Product Manager —

To better understand their users, companies are getting mobile analytics up and running almost as fast as they submit their applications to the marketplace. As traffic in the mobile channel continues to grow (witness the amount of mobile sales on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Free Shipping Day), visibility into what's happening with your customers in this space becomes increasingly important. But is it enough to just apply typical website KPIs to your mobile application? While getting standard metrics—conversion rate, device information and session length—is certainly a good start, these metrics don't paint the whole picture of what's happening with your mobile users. Shopping on a desktop at work or home doesn't compare to shopping on-the-go with a smart phone. The usual metrics that are typically monitored to optimize a website only scratch the surface of the types of data points that are needed to make your mobile application successful.

Here are some additional things you should have insight into in order to make better decisions on making improvements to your mobile application:

Device Gesture and User Behavior: Did your customer have to change the screen's orientation in order to see the full page of your mobile site or application? Did they have to pinch and zoom the screens to increase the view because the font size was too small? Which pages did they scroll up and down? How many times did a customer click the submit button on the checkout page in order to purchase something, or how many times did he have to enter the same data in a form field? When trying to get to the bottom of a conversion issue, it's important to know that your customer didn’t purchase something, but far more valuable to know that your customer tried several times to purchase something on their mobile or tablet and that your application had interaction issues.

Network Reachability: Were your customers online and reachable while they were trying to complete something important, like a purchase on your mobile application? Were they on 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi or other while your application was trying to send important bits of data? Do you know if network connectivity issues negatively impacted your customers' experience on your mobile application? Figuring out where the points of failure are in transmitting data will help you make better decisions in how you want your application to work. You may decide that your application only needs to be online for certain cases and can remain offline for others, without disrupting your user's experience.

Application Crashes: How many times did your mobile application crash on your customers? What devices were they on? What was your customer trying to do in your mobile application when it crashed? What was the network connectivity, battery level and memory usage when the application crash occurred? To find a fix, it's necessary to see the type of mobile application errors, but correlating that application error with device information, user experience and network data will help you better understand the myriad things that can go wrong with your mobile application, and ensure you make smart decisions in resolving the problems.

Want to learn more about the types of information you need to gain insights into your mobile web or application and how it can help you to create a delightful user interface, apps with fewer crashes and one that users will not only download but continue to use? Take the interactive tour of CX Mobile.

Tealeaf Best Practice #4: Mission Impossible? Empowering the Call Center to Capture Untapped Revenue While Improving Customer Satisfaction

2012-01-10T06:00:00-08:00

By Denise Jack, Director of Best Practices —

Traditionally, online businesses have considered their customer service organizations only as cost centers. That's why many call center experts still claim that the best customer service organizations are the ones that exceed in metrics like call handle time and first call resolution. But what if you can position your customer service team as a strategic asset that can generate revenue as well?

Our most innovative customers are doing just that with Tealeaf. Having recently met with several companies that have deployed Tealeaf within their call centers, I've seen a lot of progress in this area. I've seen call centers in which the agents are using Tealeaf to not only service customers who call in with a specific website issue or inquiry, but also dedicated call center teams that do proactive and targeted outreach to customers who have expressed an intent to make a purchase or book a reservation online but ultimately did not complete the transaction. Using Tealeaf to understand who those customers are and what they were trying to do on the website, these outbound agents aren’t cold calling customers but instead provide an exceptional level of customer service because they understand the customer's intent and interest.

Netflights.com (a brand of Gold Medal Travel and part of the Thomas Cook Group) is a leading UK travel company that has done quite well with this practice in their contact center. Using Tealeaf, Gold Medal Travel set up alerts for customers who have certain basket values and dropped off during the reservation process—e.g., credit card failures or being stuck in a loop. Within seconds of such a website customer struggle occurring, the outbound team receives the customers' session information to an outbound team in the contact center. The outbound agent contacts the customer immediately to attempt to complete the sale over the phone. With the help of this visibility into the online experience, this outbound team now delivers more revenue per hour than any other reservation group at Gold Medal—adding up to nearly $24M annually. The order recovery process now represents 20% of all revenue generated from netflights.com. To read more about Netflights.com, check out the case study.

If your contact center organization is viewed by the business as a pure cost center, consider this strategy as a way to help your business drive additional revenue and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty along the way.

Business Process Scorecards: Your Secret Super Power

2012-01-05T12:47:18-08:00

By Wendy Roth, Education Manager —

As part of our Best Practices series, this post offers a suggestion on how to use business process scorecards to uncover the root cause of an issue.

Remember when conversion funnel reports were cool? When being able to show what percentage of your visitors dropped out at each step impressed your colleagues? This leaves me wondering: When did they become just okay? No one would ever deny that it's useful to know where prospective customers are falling out of your conversion funnel. But what can you do about it?

Well, you can speculate what the reasons are...or you can use Tealeaf business process scorecards to uncover the true cause. Tealeaf business process scorecards look like mild-mannered web analytics conversion funnels. But don't let the glasses fool you...they have x-ray vision that can see beyond the mere fact that visitors dropped out and reveal the reasons why they did so. Because you can drill into and replay the sessions of those who abandoned the process, you can go beyond your assumptions and view it through the eyes of your customers.

How does Tealeaf do this? You'll be relieved, as I was, that super power is not required. To create a business process scorecard, you simply need to identify a multi-step process on your website you’d like to understand better. We're all familiar with the online purchase process, but not every process looks like a purchase. Some processes Tealeaf customers have tracked using business process scorecards include:

Purchasing phones and service plans for a wireless provider
Transferring funds between accounts for an online bank
Redeeming reward points for free nights at a hotel
Obtaining a car insurance policy quote

To see videos of customers and how they use Tealeaf click here. The process you'd like to track needs to have at least two steps: The point of intent, where visitors indicate they have more than a passing interest in transacting on your site, and the step where the process is completed.

Next, identify the key steps in the process. You might think that your process is easy, but do a little research on Tealeaf first to ensure the process is as streamlined as you think it is. Identify the "end point" URL, and then search for sessions that contain that URL. Replay several to identify the pages or messages a visitor had to see in order to complete the process.

Try to stay at a high level; there may be multiple permutations of your process, but look for the major steps common to most of your visitors. Your process may be only three or four steps.

Step 1: Once you've identified your process steps, create the Events for these steps. Chances are, you already have Events for these major process steps. But be sure that all Step Events are created to count only the first occurrence of the step; otherwise your data will be skewed due to visitors who go back and forth between steps. Your subsequent steps might also need to include multiple Events to verify that the visitor had in fact gone through previous steps, if it's possible for someone to skip a step in the process.

Step 2: To create your business process scorecard, simply enter your process steps in the correct order. You don't need to configure Abandonment events; Tealeaf will automatically calculate where users abandon the process based on the Events you've configured. You don't need to configure Failure Events either; that's something you can add later based on your findings.

Step 3: Now you've got your steps, you can set completion and abandonment grades.

Grade on a curve (Don't worry, I won't tell anyone), but tough enough so that you know when there's a fluctuation that's meaningful to your completion rate.

Step 4: Once your business process scorecard is in place, you'll be able to see where customers are falling out of the business process. But the secret power is the ability to drill into the drop-offs to see why there's a fluctuation. When there's an increase in drop-offs between steps, you don't need to speculate why; you can see exactly what customers encountered.

Instead of trying for weeks or months to replicate what your customers experienced in a step, you'll be able to figure it out quickly so you can swoop in and save the day. Whether or not you secretly wear a super hero spandex suite is up to you.

Modern Life is Already a Complex Struggle - Make Your Digital Presence a Struggle-free Zone

2012-01-03T06:01:00-08:00

Guest post by John W. Kolker, Web Analytics Technical Consultant, Siteworx —

Your organization already has an advanced web presence. It has been tested and there is not a single functionality error. Everything works perfectly and nothing is broken. So why then are you not getting the conversions you want on sales, registrations, subscriptions or any other process you want your digital audience to complete?

The answer is very simple: struggle. Struggle in a digital context can be defined as: The tendency for a digital user/visitor to flounder or otherwise get lost or confused on your site or application and, as a result, to be unable to fully complete a process.

With Tealeaf, struggle is measurable. It used to be that the only way we knew something was "wrong" with a website or application was by tracking errors. Errors certainly influence customer behavior as they react to the erroneous processes, but it is only one part of what makes up a struggle.

Types of Struggle:

Confusion by Design
This is struggle caused by poorly thought-out design. Remember that, just like in the real world, the digital masses are going to behave like water and take the path of least resistance to get where they want to go. The logical path to shepherd your visitors should be straightforward and the most obvious.

Digital ADD
Overwhelming your visitors with too many choices, too many forks in the road and too many distractions is a sure way to impose digital thrashing and a struggle that resembles a form of Digital Attention Deficit Disorder. Make the path clean and uncluttered. If your goal is to have a visitor add something to his cart, whip out his credit card and make a payment, then once an item is in the cart there should only be one primary path without other navigation options and links. Of course, if you goal is to also cross-sell or up-sell, then other paths should also be added.

Dead-Ending
This type of struggle usually occurs at the end of a path down which you wanted your visitor to proceed. A common example of this is site search results that return zero matches. Many times, content on the response page is very generic and can be something like, "Query returned no results, please modify criteria."

So, now the visitor is asking himself, "Really? So, hmmm, you didn’t find what I was looking for, so now what?" Essentially, you have dead-ended the visitor. A simple content adjustment and perhaps a "continue" or "search again" button may do the trick to take him out of this situation. Tealeaf can help you identify this type of struggle and help you remove dead-ends that trap your visitors and prevent them from being successful.

Demanding Too Much
Also known as the "Are you kidding me!?" struggle.

Let's say your visitor wants to buy a light bulb on your e-commerce site. He starts shopping and find the bulb he wants. Then, he adds it to his cart. So far, so good—but then he has to register because your site doesn't offer guest checkout. Your registration process is five steps long and now he has to wait for an email to get the link to confirm their registration and then click "continue" to login. All he wanted to do was buy the #$%! light bulb. At this point, the visitor may be thinking: "Are you kidding me?" Struggle like this should be a thing of the past, but the surprise is that it still exists on many e-commerce sites. Tealeaf can be used to track this type of struggle and, as you simplify the process, help you quantify how the struggle goes down and the conversions go up.

Why is measuring and resolving struggle so important? The answer is very simple:

Struggle leads to poor brand experiences and abandonment.

Tealeaf is invaluable in tracking the customer experience and providing valuable insights into brand experience. Brand experience can be understood as the measurable sentiment garnered from visual, verbal and experiential encounters with the brand. The brand experience encompasses a range of intellectual, sensory and emotional connections. In other words, anytime someone touches your company (print, email, Web, social media, brick-and-mortar, etc.) they are experiencing your brand—whether it is good, neutral, or bad. And that experience will stay with them...for some time.

In part two of this blog post, I will discuss in detail how to conduct an unstructured analysis of the various types of struggles so a user can understand what causes it and, more importantly, how Tealeaf can be used to resolve those struggles.

Siteworx, a leading interactive agency and Web content management (WCM) consultancy, helps interactive marketers, Web strategists and technology leaders achieve measurable business results.