Tealeaf: Visibility. Insight. Answers.

The Evolution of the Cookie – Too much of a good thing?

2009-02-25T10:37:16-08:00

Back when I was a kid, “Cookie Wars” meant choosing between Chips Ahoy, Oreo or Hydrox. Being from Baltimore, the clear winner was Berger’s – a local favorite.

Nowadays, we have a new cookie battleground, the web browser.

Wikipedia HTTP Cookie Definition

HTTP cookies, more commonly referred to as Web cookies, tracking cookies or just cookies, are parcels of text sent by a server to a Web client (usually a browser) and then sent back unchanged by the client each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for authenticating, session tracking (state maintenance), and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences or the contents of their electronic shopping carts.

The term "cookie" is derived from "magic cookie," a well-known concept in UNIX computing which inspired both the idea and the name of HTTP cookies. Tracking cookies track your web browsing habits. They can collect information about pages and advertisements you have seen or any other activity during browsing. Different websites can share tracking cookies, and each website with the same tracking cookie can read the information and write new information into it.

“C is for Cookie”
Everyone loves cookies, the more the merrier – So what’s the fight about?

Everybody is trying to use cookies for different purposes. In addition to the cookies that are used by mainstream applications for authentication and personalization, cookies are now being set for mash-ups and additional services: Google Analytics, survey products, chat, A/B testing , etc.

So, when your application starts breaking in ways that you can’t understand impacting your site and your customer's experience, start counting your cookies. If you are over 15 cookies, start worrying.

Number and size limits of a cookie in Internet Explorer (Microsoft Help and Support)

If a Web application uses more than 19 custom cookies, ASP session state may be lost. Internet Explorer 4.0 and later versions allow a total of 20 cookies for each domain. Because ASPSessionID is a cookie, if you use 20 or more custom cookies, the browser is forced to discard the ASPSessionID cookie and lose the session.

Time for a Diet?

You are not alone, even the Cookie Monster is singing a new tune. In 2006, in response to concerns over childhood obesity even the Cookie Monster had to change his ways and discuss healthy habits, and in 2007 on a Martha Stewart show Cookies became a “sometimes food”.

-- Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO

When Good Shopping Carts Go Bad

2009-02-11T10:44:49-08:00

It’s no surprise that shopping online is different than buying in ‘the real world’. The differences are endless and the simplest distinction is in the outcome— the conversion rate.

Many reports put the average online conversion rate at 2%-3% percent and the cart abandonment rate above 60%.* Imagine your local supermarket with half full carts scattered throughout the store, people asking each other for product reviews and opinions, hunting for coupons during checkout. Yikes! But that is today’s self-created online reality.

Online channels have historically developed their own set of rules (When was the last time the supermarket asked you to add an item to your cart before you could see the price?) which could be fostering abandonment. On the upside, these online merchants have options; when people leave items in the cart online there are ways to follow-up in hopes of getting customers to convert.

In the supermarket, if you removed an item at the last minute, or walked away from your cart, you don't expect the cashier to chase you down in the parking lot offering you 10% off if you buy within the next 30 minutes.

Enter the world of abandoned cart remarketing

In the example above, website analytics married to email creates a profitable remarketing opportunity for savvy merchants. A Google search on “Abandoned Cart Remarketing” will return results featuring best practices from all the top-tier Email service providers. I recently sat through an informative workshop outlining the steps to scrape shopping cart data from your web analytics tool, drop in a template, add your incentive code and deliver it to the customer only minutes after they left your site.

The deeper you align your marketing efforts to your individual customer’s behavior, the better your results. Rich insight leads to campaign modifications that can counter negative behavior and minimize the ‘Pavlovian’ traps that cause shoppers to abandon.

But what happens when Good Carts Go Bad?

Unlike the Rotisserie infomercial, it’s not “Set it and Forget it”.

Understanding WHY the customer abandoned is critical for honing in on what the best remarketing efforts would be and which could be counterproductive.

"Do you know what percentage of your abandonment is due to buying behavior and what percentage to transaction failure?"

What about the customers who WANT to purchase but your site fails them?

Let’s see how plays out in the ‘real’ world of online commerce

Customer attempts to checkout
Site fails the customer (cart issue, site error message, UI issue, 404…)
Customer abandons with items left in the cart
Remarketing kicks in – the customer gets email invite to re-engage, along with a discount
Customer attempts to convert
Site Fails, Again

Ouch, you are now blindly encouraging the failure, customer after customer, putting your brand at risk and you didn’t even see it. Can you think of a worst case scenario?

Your Customer‘s Reaction:

After your marketing dollars create demand, they give up on your site and buy from the competition, which is simple online – that competitor is merely a couple clicks away.
They spread the word that your site failed them, frequently on widely disseminated channels, such as blogs, review sites or social networks
They unsubscribe from your email list, or even worse mark you as “SPAM” out of anger

That potential customer who started out trying to give you money has now become a brand liability. This occurrence in volume can affect your email sender score threatening to send your following campaigns right to the junk/SPAM folder.

Extreme example? Yes. Possible? Sure. Pete Blackshaw wrote a book on just the topic, ‘Angry Customers tell 3,000’ and Forbes.com turned the topic and event panel into a 3 minute video, ‘Cyber Shoppers Complain’.

Death by 1,000 Cuts

You have now lost an online sale which could trickle into off-line brand avoidance and with social media influence, potentially impact your ability to attract future customers. Internally, your email manager is wondering why the opt-out rate is increasing (even with successful opens and clicks) and your line-of-business owner sees high-value customers leaving your database. Your long-term customer valuation metrics start dipping south and without visibility into the user’s online behavior, everyone starts asking the question, “Why”?

When the sink overflows the first thought might be to grab the towel… You may want to turn the water off first….

Look hard into your abandonments, meet with your entire marketing team and asking the hard questions, starting with ”Why are people not completing transactions?”. Discovering, indentifying and fixing these issues will not only improve your overall conversion rate immediately, it will fine tune all associated remarketing efforts. Your email team will thank you, along with your boss, shareholders and oh… your customers too.

-- Dave Ewart, Director, Online Marketing

* Coremetrics Benchmark 2008 December US Retail Report

What happens when the Web is the only choice?

2009-01-28T08:16:51-08:00

I’ve always been a keen advocate of customer self-service. For most things, I would prefer to get my task (buy, pay, research, gain information) in a quick and efficient manner without relying on anyone else.

In today’s harder economic times, this is even more true, especially when the call center is outsourced and I know more about the issue than they do. But now, I see something different brewing on the horizon.

We take it for granted that sites like eBay and Facebook are web only – i.e. you can only interact via a computer.

At Amazon and Hotels.com – you have a choice, you can either buy directly on the web site, or you can converse with a human. They want your business and created channels to increase conversion.

Amazon is an interesting case. Even if I am not planning to buy a particular item from Amazon, I do my basic market research there. They have great product descriptions and community reviews, which I have come to depend upon.

Nowadays, the airlines want to charge you to speak to a human being. I am okay with this for the most part – but I feel unfairly penalized when the transaction that I am trying to do cannot be done without a human. I would suggest that they make all business processes self-service capable, if they want to charge me for human intervention.

And now, I see something entirely new. Recently, I received an email from the bank holding my mortgage. Since I had paid the bill online, they decided that the only way that I can receive my year end tax statement is to logon to their site and download and print it. While this doesn’t sound onerous, and in general I am a believer in “green causes”, I was taken aback by this stance. Where was the choice, what is my alternative? In this case, green was all about saving money, the bank’s.

What this means to me is that when the Web goes from “self-service” to the only channel for interacting with an organization, the web site better work, it needs to be more than just reliable, it needs to be convenient, adaptive and delightful. I’m not sure if my bank is up to this challenge, but in these days of doing “more with less”, I expect to see a lot of companies acting this way.

When the website becomes the only option to convert, transact and communicate, I guess I still always have an option. If it fails, I take my business to www.somebodyelse.com.

Since consumers still have that option then protecting the success of the online channel is no longer an option for companies, it’s a mandate.

-- Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO

Customer Experience Across the Network with Tealeaf

2008-11-12T11:00:44-08:00

The Tealeaf Network Effect
Tealeaf today enables online businesses to see their customer’s actual online experience to better analyze their motivations and behavior and understand “why” conversions are occurring, or not.

What’s the vision of Tealeaf for tomorrow:

What have we learned from helping customers analyze and understand customer behavior on their websites from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and beyond?
What does Web 3.0 look like for the users and for companies looking to convert on their visitor’s intentions?
How will the growth of the web and complexity of syndicated content, conversions and partnering across merchants affect online customer behavior?
What challenges will merchants face in supporting and delivering a user networked experience?

Companies of tomorrow will provide content, services and conversions across a multitude of partners and domains. When a consumer aligns with a single brand, but the experience spans multiple partners how can the company support the transaction?

When companies outsource site functions, how can they capture the complete experience?
When an airline sells a credit card via a partner, how can they assure a successful conversion?
When a banking customer uses bill pay, who do they contact for assistance and how can a bank support them?

Let’s look at Tealeaf of tomorrow; how extending the visibility of the online user across the network brings value to companies needing to see their complete users experience and ensure success in the face of their customer’s increasing expectations.

Customer Experience Across the Network with Tealeaf

-- Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO

Success is... a customer that "gets it"

2008-10-27T14:43:42-07:00

There are many stages to starting a software company. You need to have an idea, money, people, infrastructure. But the thing that you need the most are customers who “get it.”

Customers who “get it” not only fill your inbox with bugs and feature requests, they take your product and ideas and apply them in ways that you would never have thought of. And then you sit back and say “Cool” – because you realize that your ideas are truly having an impact.

Key Relevance Review of eMetrics: Hotels.com’s Joe Megibow Keynote
By Liana “Li” Evans
"I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a keynote be so insightful and revealing about a major internet website as I did when I attended Joe Megibow’s Keynote at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC."

Hats off to Hotels.com for really "getting it".

-- Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO

Origins of the Tealeaf Name

2008-10-22T05:59:05-07:00

I stumbled across an article recently comparing Tealeaf to Apple, Macintosh and Blackberry, well our name specifically, and it had me reminisce about the origins of "Tealeaf" and in turn our path to the name.

Looking for Names in All the Wrong Places: the Power of Borrowing Names by Burt Alper
BlackBerry, Apple, Macintosh. Some of the most successful product names and company names have unexpected roots. For a software technology that’s all about gaining insight into customers’ online experience—and foreseeing and managing future experiences—Tealeaf Technology is a disarmingly intuitive name.

Many people are aware that the core Tealeaf technology originated inside of SAP. In developing employee self-service applications during 1996-1997, my team became frustrated at the inability to understand and recreate issues that happened at our customer sites, and I felt the obstacles affected others.

While we were at SAP, we called the core technology 'Project Blackbox'. The notion of employing a flight recorder for a transactional web site was easy to understand. With SAP's permission, we received the rights to spinoff the Blackbox technology as an independent, venture funded company in 1999. While we gravitated to the Blackbox name initially -- there were several key challenges:

Many people associated the value of a blackbox, aka flight recorder as only providing value when things crashed. Our technology was designed to assist with finding and fixing application errors, not disaster recovery.
There was a successful electronics company called 'Blackbox' -- so calling ourselves Blackbox Software was going to cause confusion.

Around the same time, with a maturing product we started giving our product components names. We quickly seized upon the notion that our capture of user sessions allowed a 'DejaView' like understanding of the user’s experience. People understood and loved the 'Deja' metaphor and soon we were calling the company 'DejaCube'.

Our original thought was that the 'cube container' would allow us to expand the product/messaging as the product suite was developed-- however when we did our first tour of analyst relations -- one analyst insisted that any company with the name 'Cube' in it -- had to be “simply” an OLAP analytics company, not where we were wanting to go.

We took that feedback to heart and we looked at many alternatives before deciding on Tealeaf, a name that conveys both our past heritage and future vision. Of course, the WWW being what it was the domain was being squatted on; but getting the name at a reasonable price launched our company's brand.

In our company history, there have been some funny tealeaf anecdotes over the years.

To people within the United States, the analogy of reading the tea leaves to understanding web site experience is understood. However, in Germany -- they don't read tea leaves, they read coffee grinds. In the UK, where we now have a thriving presence, tealeaf is slang for thief.

-- Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO

The "V's have it" - Virtualization, Visibility and...

2008-09-26T11:19:26-07:00

I was talking with a technology partner about what Tealeaf does and what our value is. He stopped me cold with the observation “Virtualization and Visibility” – that’s what it’s all about.

Webster’s defines Visibility as:
1: the quality or state of being visible
2 a: the degree of clearness (as of the atmosphere or ocean) ; specifically : the greatest distance through the atmosphere toward the horizon at which prominent objects can be identified with the naked eye b: capability of being readily noticed c: capability of affording an unobstructed view d: publicity 2d
3: a measure of the ability of radiant energy to evoke visual sensation

In terms of Tealeaf, Visibility is the power to see your online customer each and every time they visit and interact with your site.

Wikipedia defines virtualization a few ways:
In computing, virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources:

Resource virtualization, the virtualization of specific system resources, such as storage volumes, name spaces, and network resources
Application virtualization, the hosting of individual applications on alien hardware/software
Desktop virtualization, the remote manipulation of a computer desktop

While we’re not part of the first “V” – we are the leader in providing visibility for web applications.

Going against the grain here, I think that there’s another “V’ coming for us as well. Being the nerd that I am, I tend to email my wife instead of walking across the house to talk with her. In our family of 5, we have more computers than people. Normally, our household computers are 2-3 year old technology built out of scavenged parts. For the first time in a long while, I bought a computer – in a box, at retail. HP slimline, Dual-Core 2.7 GHZ AMD with 4GB of RAM and 500GB SATA drive for $400. At this price, it’s too cheap to pilfer/scavenge/recycle. It came with Windows Vista 64. Admittedly, the first service pack was close to 400MB in size – but so far, I am impressed. It may be the hardware, it may be the ram, but I am liking what I am seeing with Vista-64.

So, time for V**3 – Virtualization, Visibility and Vista.

How to Prioritize Customer Experience Issues Based on Business Impact

2008-08-26T11:34:03-07:00

It’s almost always a given that constraints exist on both the time and budget that are available to optimize your customers’ experience. You probably have a long list of issues to address, voices in the room and possibly even competing interests.

Where do you start?

Once you get past the urgent issues, it can be hard to tell what’s most important. I have found that the missing link for most ebusinesses is quantification—without quantifying the business impact of each customer experience issue, you may not prioritize the most important ones. And lack of quantification may even prevent you from addressing some issues at all.

My previous blog entries have talked about best practices that help you to become aware of customer experience issues and to understand why these issues are occurring. In the process of sharing real-world examples of these best practices, I also touched on how you would quantify the impact of a particular issue. This quantification leads to the final best practice I’m going to discuss in this series: prioritize your customer experience issues based on the business impact.

For every issue, you need to be able to answer the following questions:

When did this issue start?
How many visitors per day experience it?
What is the difference in conversion rates (or other key task completion rates) between visitors who experience the issue and those who don’t?
Given the number of visitors affected, to what losses in sales/profits do these changes in conversion rates translate? In other words, how much business is being lost every day because of this issue?
How does lost sales/profits compare with other issues? How does it compare with the cost of resolving the problem?

Armed with this knowledge, you can build a clearly quantifiable business case that helps you set customer experience optimization priorities and improve revenue.

Let’s look at an example. Tealeaf customer Art.com generates significant traffic via search engines. Many of these indexed links send a user directly to specific product pages within their web site. However, the inventory on the site is incredibly dynamic, with products constantly going in and out of stock. Because the search engine indices can’t keep up, the first impression many customers get is a “sorry this product is no longer available” message. While reviewing customer sessions in Tealeaf, the user experience team at Art.com saw a number of customers getting this experience. Obviously, this is not the favorable first impression they wanted to impart, but no one really knew the magnitude of the problem.

The team realized that determining the extent of this problem would be very simple using Tealeaf. To their surprise, they found that 15,000 to 20,000 customers per day were seeing this unfriendly message. By reviewing multiple user sessions, seeing their purchase behavior and experiencing the “anti-shopping” experience first hand, it was an easy decision to re prioritize a better solution to this issue. The company immediately focused on a redesign that would give customers a more positive and actionable screen that recommends alternative products even if the original product is currently out of stock.

What are the best practices for quantifying the business impact?

Once a customer experience problem has been identified, use your customer experience management solution to determine the number of visitors impacted and the impact on conversion rates (or task completion rates) for those visitors.
Monetize the outcome by using a measure for the average value lost by customers not completing this task (for example the average shopping cart value for a checkout process). The number of customers impacted during a defined time period, the drop in conversion rates based on the issue and the average value for these lost transactions will enable you to calculate the approximate overall loss for a given period of time because of this issue.

For Art.com, this customer experience management best practice was what made it a no-brainer to invest in turning a formerly unfriendly, negative experience into a more positive, pro-shopping experience for its customers. As an additional benefit, Art.com was able to realize a greater return on their SEO/SEM customer acquisition programs. You too will benefit from knowing that you’re investing your resources where they will make the biggest improvements to customer experience.

-- John Dawes, Vice President, Product Management

Real-Time Response to Known Technical Issues

2008-08-19T14:41:57-07:00

Every IT person I know can name at least ten generic conditions and errors that lead to poor customer experience. It’s not hard to figure out that if a customer is seeing messages like “Invalid SQL” or “Sorry, Page Not Found,” he or she is probably not accomplishing the task that he or she wanted to accomplish. This customer experience management best practice is about putting processes in place to identify technical and application issues, track those issues and trigger a response by IT whenever a significant number of customers experience them.

You should be looking for the following types of things:

Known error pages such as the global error page.
Known application or system error messages, such as “Sorry, please try again later (status code xxxx).” Even if you think that you know all of these messages, you should work with your development team to verify the list and put a process in place to update the list as the site changes.
Unexpected error messages or pages: It is hard to anticipate every error in advance; virtually every Tealeaf customer I talk to has seen unexpected errors at some point. In addition to looking for standard messages such as “SQL Error,” our customers have found it helpful to search their customer sessions for keywords such as “sorry” or “apologize.” They have found new error conditions in this way.
Known bad status codes, such as a 500 error.
Slow page performance: For example, a page that takes over ten seconds to be delivered to the user is certainly creating a very poor customer experience.

You can track many of the conditions I describe above with existing site management tools. For others, such as the unexpected error messages, you will need a customer experience management solution like Tealeaf. However you track them, you should think about:

How will IT be able to be notified of the condition, and at what point should someone respond?
A single instance of “Sorry, Page Not Found” is probably not worth paging someone in the middle of the night. You should define thresholds for each issue and set up a way for alerts to go out when the thresholds are exceeded. Many Tealeaf customers base these thresholds on previous activity, triggering an alert when the percentage of customers getting an error page exceeds 10% of the maximum percentage in the past month.
How will IT diagnose the issue?
Sometimes the underlying cause may be clear right away, but other times it may take a while to reproduce. A customer experience management tool can save a lot of time by providing a visual context for where customers are encountering obstacles.
What is the real impact of a particular technical problem on my business?
For example, can you correlate slowdowns in response time to task completion or conversion rates? An increase in the time it takes to get search results from two to three seconds may have no impact on a shopper’s purchase decision, but the same increase in response time for displaying the product details page could have a major impact on conversion rates.

One of our customers, ARC, has seen a lot of benefit from taking this kind of proactive approach to known technical issues. Originally, the company’s web-based applications were built so that when an internal error did occur, the application automatically displayed an “application error, please call support” message. Following instructions, ARC’s customers (travel agents) who saw this message would call the ARC customer service center. But the Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) handling these calls had no visibility into the site’s problems; as a result, they would have to escalate all of these issues to production support. Production support would then research the problems and report their findings back to the CSRs, who in turn would get back to the travel agents who had called. The process was reactive, cumbersome and costly—to say the least.

ARC’s production support team used Tealeaf’s real-time alerting capability (read the ARC case study) to establish a new, proactive approach to the problem. Now, every time one of the applications generates an “application error” message, the production support team is instantly notified—allowing them to intervene immediately. Often, this means that before a travel agent has time to call into the customer service center, the issue has either been fixed, or the CSR is at least already aware of the problem and can communicate appropriately with incoming callers.

To summarize this best practice, here are the steps you should take to respond to known technical issues in real-time:

Define the known technical issues to track. Start with the list of issues described above and then determine what is appropriate for your site. Getting a full list can require involvement from your development team, who will know about known exceptions that might be shown to users. Keeping this list up to date requires a defined process with your development team so that new error messages can be added as the site changes. Some ebusinesses even have a standard format for error pages or a standard comment in the page so that they can set up their customer experience management solution to identify future error pages in advance.
If you have a customer experience management solution, use it to search for keywords like “sorry” and “apologize” that often accompany error messages. Do this on a regular basis. I think that you will uncover new errors that aren’t being tracked.
Define thresholds for known errors and create a system so that the right people get real-time alerts when the thresholds are exceeded. You can determine the appropriate thresholds based on deviations from historical norms.
Define owners: who should receive these alerts and what steps should be taken when they receive each of them. For some sites, these alerts should go to the network operations center which can monitor them 24x7 in real-time. Once they receive an alert, the operations team can pull in the appropriate teams as needed.

These steps give your error messages the right context—customer experience—to help you explain the underlying problems and get them fixed.

-- John Dawes, Vice President, Product Management

Investigate Application Log Errors for Customer Experience Impact

2008-08-14T16:59:52-07:00

If your web site is critical to your business, you have probably put in place tools and systems to monitor your applications at all times and respond to problems. Almost all of our customers use performance management tools to track application performance, response time, error rates, and similar IT-oriented metrics. In addition, error logs contain valuable information about what happened on your site. The trick is to be able to analyze the information in these logs not just for its own sake but from the perspective of customer experience.

After all, application problems do not always translate into poor customer experience while problems that do cause poor customer experience do not always get logged, for example:

Your server fails for a full hour...

Were customers actually affected?
Did failover work properly and hide the whole event from the customers?
If there is a whole log file full of errors from your application servers about an inability to process user credentials, did customers see errors or did exception handling work properly?

The real metric that matters, of course, is customer experience—what impact a problem had on conversion rates, sales, and customer loyalty. As a customer experience management best practice, you should always investigate the application errors in a log file to get real answers. If a server went down, for example, find out:

How many customers had active sessions on that server when it went down?
Did they lose state (such as losing their shopping cart)?
Did they see strange error messages?

You can also look for users who attempted to go to that server while it was down, perhaps because they had a bookmark that went directly to it. And most importantly, you can analyze the overall impact to your business: as a group, did they convert at a lower rate than expected?

One of our customers, a financial services organization, has taken this concept even farther. They track all of their service level agreements based on their impact on customers. As a standard operating procedure, any time the firm has a server outage or other problem, staff go into Tealeaf to investigate and quantify the impact on actual customers. This approach ensures that service level agreements have real meaning to IT and that the business owners clearly understand their value. I think that a lot of IT organizations could benefit from taking an approach like theirs.

-- John Dawes, Vice President, Product Management