This Thursday 8th Nov I’ll be presenting at the London Stock Exchange and next wednesday 14th Nov at Web Analytics Wednesday in London’s covent garden. As we move beyond pure web analytics, to trying to get into our customer’s head to understand their experience on our website, how can customer experience management tools help us.

There are tools available now such as tealeaf and speedtrap that allow us to replay exactly what our customers did on our site, a bit like a video player of exactly what they did on your website. Very cool. I also had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours with Robert Wenig, CTO and founder of tealeaf yesterday.

What customers actually need compared to what they actually get

 
Sometimes an image says more than a thousand words… Have you come across this scenarion before?
Click on the image to make it bigger / readable

Why do we need to understand our customer’s experience and how can tools help us?

1. The unique session replay functionality would allow the company to hone in on live technical and customer orientated issues to achieve a fix with a quick turnaround on their website.
2. Help customer services teams work with customers where they were having a problem on the website doing what they wanted to do – so the customer services team can replay the customer’s session and tell them where they missed a step or alternatively where the website didn’t deliver.
3. Identify poor customer experience in our customer journey on the website e.g look up sessions where a page or image had a problem loading, 404 errors etc, couldn’t find address, couldn’t find product etc.
4. Identify fraud or unexpected activity on financial services websites and look at the fraudster’s activity.
5. Weekly meetings to go through problem sessions, come up with ideas and identify solutions.
6. Compare click activity on a page to mouse movements on a page to eg identify elements on a page that are encouraging a high number of mouse movements but that are non-clickable (and hence should be clickable).
7. Real time data.
8. With a snippet of javascript, the ability to see which fields in a form were filled out even though the form was never sent.
Are there others that I haven’t thought of? Are you getting inside your customer’s heads with pure web analytics tools so don’t use these customer experience management tools?

But there are alot of challenges associated with these tools:

1. The cost – they are extremely expensive.
2. Actually getting people internally within the company to use them, for example creating a culture where tech support and or customer services actively use these tools in their daily role.
3. Lots of training and learning and time on how to use the product and to configure the events required from scratch.
4. Set up and configuration of the product across all hosting sites and servers, tealeaf uses http requests for example.
5. Getting to grips with the “customer experience method of thinking” in terms of the perceived traditional web analytics definitions of items such as visits and page impressions versus “sessions”.
Have you found challenges delivering value using customer experience management tools?

This web analytics wednesday is a discussion on how we all think that these tools could or should drive or delivervalue to drive commercial benefit and of course better customer experience.
How do you get inside the head of your customers?

I will also be drawing on my experience at Rightmove (26 million visits a month and tenth most popular website in the UK) where we have started using tealeaf to help.

Any thoughts, ideas – do you use customer experience tools, do you wish you did, do you think that we don’t need them and we can get into our customer’s heads with traditional Voice of customer, surveys, polls, web analytics solutions, engagement metrics etc?

Thanks so much for reading and if you are coming to either of the upcoming events, see you soon