Establishing a disciplined approach to online customer experience

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Establishing a disciplined approach to online customer experience optimizationTwelve best practices

Establishing a disciplined approach to online customer experience optimization

Contents

2 Executive summary

4 Why online customer experience is top of mind

5 Visibility, insight and answers – a simple methodology to success

7 Twelve best practices 7 Visibility: best practices 20 Insight: best practices 22 Answers: best practices

23 Where should I start?

24 Conclusion

Executive summaryA key goal of e-business should be to continually improve, to constantly produce a better website – one that delivers more value and a better customer experience. One that is better than what you have provided in the past, and better than what competitors are currently providing.

To continually improve, companies invest in their website. They invest in site redesigns. They invest in Web 2.0 technologies. They also invest in tools like web analytics and Voice of Customer surveys. These tools are great for providing awareness – awareness to site trends, customer satisfaction and the effectiveness of certain aspects of the site. However, they do not provide a unified view of the online customer experience, with both quantitative and qualitative data. On their own, they do not provide a framework for a comprehensive, data-driven process for evaluating customer experience. And, without defined processes and without the complete dataset of user experience, e-businesses are forced to fall back on opinion and hunches when making critical decisions about website optimization efforts.

In fact, a recently published Forrester Research report reveals that nearly all customer experience decision-makers (93percent) say that a good customer experience is one of their top strategic priorities, and 75percent say they want to use customer experience as a competitive differentiator.1 IBM Tealeaf Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions are designed to help e-businesses remedy this divide by establishing a more systematic, data-driven approach to understanding the customer experience. IBM Tealeaf solutions uniquely capture and record what each customer is doing and seeing in real-time on each page and across site visits. In doing so, IBM Tealeaf solutions gather both quantitative data by capturing statistics about each customer, as well as qualitative experience information by capturing each customer’s true behavior – information that is foundational to improving online customer experience and optimizing the web.

Best practices for customer experience optimizationIBM Tealeaf solutions are the result of over a decade working with hundreds of organizations to help them take a more systematic, quantifiable approach to improving online customer experience. In the process, we have developed a set of best practices which provide a way for customer-centric companies to utilize their website optimization tools in concert to create visibility, to gain insights about customer behavior and, most importantly, to find the right answers that enable them to provide more value to customers.

VisibilityIn this paper, we will describe the steps to becoming aware of potential customer experience issues – the Visibility phase of our methodology. We will present best practices for setting up processes, systems and even mindsets to help ensure that you become aware of customer experience issues through:

• Systematic customer listening initiatives.• Proactive, scheduled customer experience reviews.• Ongoing optimization of website metrics.• Regular application health monitoring.

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These best practices will show you how to use your existing site tools for customer experience awareness. They are designed to help you understand why the qualitative customer experience data gleaned from IBM Tealeaf solutions is essential, both alone and as a complement to data provided by existing tools.

InsightWe will then explain how to use IBM Tealeaf solutions to perform – customer behavior analysis. This is the Insight phase of our methodology. Using real-world examples from our customers, we will describe how to take a deep look at each customer experience issue until you understand both the root cause of the issue and its business impact.

AnswersWe will also discuss how to use the insights gleaned from IBM Tealeaf solutions to implement changes that deliver real improvements to your online customer experience – the Answers phase, including customer follow-up and steps to proactively identify the same or similar problems going forward.

Getting started Finally, we will put forth a roadmap for how best to get started with online customer experience optimization. The collective experience of our customers has shown that the optimal approach is a phased one, moving through the following levels of maturity:

• Reactiveproblemresolution: respond to customer problems in a truly comprehensive way.

• Activealertingandissuemonitoring: become more proactive about resolving customer issues.

• Proactivediscoveryandanalysis: uncover the major obstacles that impact your customers.

• Customerexperienceoptimization: create a comprehensive approach to understanding your customers.

The majority of our customers have been able to move from the first phase into the last phase very quickly. And in fact, virtually all of our customers have reported recouping their investment in IBM Tealeaf solutions in the first phase – reactive problem resolution – alone. Figure 1 below is a roadmap of how these best practices are typically adopted by an organization.

Figure 1: Best practices roadmap

The impact is greater than you thinkA Mobile Transactions survey was conducted online within the United States and Great Britain by Harris Interactive on behalf of Tealeaf (now IBM) between February 9-11, 2011 among 2,469 US adults ages 18+ and between February 9 and February 14, 2011, among 2,228 UK adults age 16+.3

The survey illustrates an alarming rate of website issues – with nine out of 10 consumers experiencing difficulties online. To make matters worse, the same survey reports that 42 percent of consumers abandon their transactions when they experience online road blocks or simply switch to a competitor – equating to billions, if not trillions, in lost revenue per year across the Internet.4

In our experience, e-businesses struggle to take a disciplined approach to improving the online customer experience because they do not have the proper processes and systems in place to investigate customer experience online. Those who invested in tools such as web analytics, Voice of Customer surveys, or multivariate testing products find they do not have a complete picture of customer experience. Some of these tools provide great quantitative data, giving e-businesses an aggregate view of visitors, conversion rates, drop-offs, task abandonment, or overall satisfaction with a process. While quantitative data often tells you where to look for a problem, it rarely provides any information to help you determine what the problem is. Other tools provide useful descriptive data such as customer feedback in a survey. This qualitative information can be instrumental in identifying what a specific problem is, but it does not help you determine how important that problem is to your business. In order to make more informed, data-driven decisions, e-businesses need both quantitative and qualitative information.

As companies progress through each of these levels of maturity, they establish an increasingly disciplined approach to online customer experience optimization. The end result is more satisfied online customers who abandon fewer transactions, spend more with your business, and remain loyal over time.

Why online customer experience is top of mindIt is very difficult, if not impossible, to build and maintain a dynamic website that works flawlessly every moment of every day for every customer. Between implementing new content, changing technology, managing internal stakeholders and designing for customers who have different objectives, learning styles and backgrounds, you cannot produce a 100 percent error-free site that is highly usable for each visitor. After all, to err is human.

And it is no big surprise that online customers experience problems from time to time. We have all encountered them, whether it is difficulty logging into an account, adding an item to a shopping cart, navigating through a site, or getting a confusing error message. Yet, with the proliferation of message boards, blogs and social networking sites, one poor customer experience can take on a life of its own, potentially damaging your brand and bottom line.

A recent Forrester Research report2 highlights that customer service is the cornerstone of a company’s customer experience strategy; however, the reality is that few companies are doing anything about optimizing the service experience; they still primarily focus on cost-control measures, and only 37 percent of companies have a dedicated budget for customer experience initiatives. In other words, most companies have not yet changed the company culture with mobilizing the entire company around what matters most - the customer.


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Without defined processes and the complete customer experience context, e-businesses fall back on theories and conjecture when they make critical judgments about customer experience. Furthermore, they find it far too easy to ignore suspected customer experience issues that they cannot explain and/or cannot quantify.

The missing ingredient – customer behavior analysisImproving online customer experience requires complete visibility into the “storefront” of your online customers – the browser. Because IBM Tealeaf solutions uniquely capture and record what each customer is doing and seeing in real-time on each page and across site visits, our solutions provide both the quantitative data and the qualitative experience information necessary to understand customers’ true experience.

Regardless of how you become aware of potential customer experience issues, customer behavior analysis is how you answer the why questions about the website: Why do more customers abandon the credit card application on the second step rather than the first step? Why are customers searching for products multiple times and still not adding items to the shopping cart? With the visual evidence IBM Tealeaf solutions provide, you have the full context to analyze customer behavior and understand why a given user did or did not complete a process successfully on your site. You also have the quantitative information necessary to follow up your customer behavior analysis with an assessment of the actual business impact of customer experience issues so you know how you should prioritize your optimization efforts. So, how do you get started?

Visibility, insight and answers – a simple methodology to successWe have spent the last decade working with hundreds of organizations to help them take a more systematic, quantifiable approach to customer experience optimization. The best practices we have developed from working with these customers are divided into three distinct phases – Visibility, Insight and Answers.

Figure 2: Visibility, Insight and Answers – a simple methodology for customer behavior analysis

Phase 1 – VisibilityThis phase is about setting up the right processes, systems and even mindset to make sure that you become aware of customer experience issues through:

• Systematic customer listening initiatives.• Proactive, scheduled customer experience reviews.• Ongoing optimization of website metrics.• Regular application health monitoring.

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While there are many tools available to help e-businesses observe elements of the customer experience including web analytics and Voice of Customer surveys, these tools often only provide enough information to make you aware of a potential problem. For example, web analytics may show that two customer segments are converting at different rates, but to understand why these segments are performing differently, you need to be able to compare what the two groups of users are actually doing. It is qualitative customer experience data gathered using IBM Tealeaf solutions that can provide fundamental information about why.

Figure 3: Components of the Visibility phase

Phase 2 – InsightIn this phase, you take a deep look at each customer experience issue until you understand both the root cause of the issue and its business impact. It includes:

• Advancedcustomerbehavioranalysis:The free-text search capabilities of IBM Tealeaf solutions, as well as the ability to “slice-and-dice” customer segments based on customer behavior, help you to find appropriate customer sessions to analyze for potential problems. Then, the visual replay capabilities of IBM Tealeaf solutions enable you to take a deep, first-hand look into actual experiences. This is what takes you past just knowing there is a problem to understanding exactly what that problem is.

• Businessimpactquantification: IBM Tealeaf solutions also provide the quantitative data necessary to understand the business impact of customer experience issues so you can prioritize site enhancements accordingly.

Figure 4: Components of the Insight phase

Where do I start customer behavior analysis? I have so many sessions!

When e-business leaders begin to think about implementing online customer experience optimization initiatives, many of them are overwhelmed by the thought of having thousands, if not millions, of individual customer sessions to review. However, just because you cannot look at all of your customers’ sessions – or everyone who abandoned a shopping cart – does not mean that you should not look at any sessions! Call center managers have long known the value of listening in on a sample of calls, and retailers regularly observe shoppers in the store. Just as in the call center or the store, you can get a tremendous amount of value from reviewing a very limited number of online customer sessions, perhaps just 20. The best practices in this white paper will help you to know which sessions you should be looking at – which ones are most likely to give you the insight that will lead to optimal improvements in customer experience.

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monitoring the health of their online applications. The following best practices describe how you can capture customer feedback systematically and take the next step for analyzing what the feedback truly means.

Customer listening initiativesCustomers are often your best source of information as to why your site is not delivering as much value as you (or they) would like. And they are already talking to you. What you need is a systematic way to listen to them and turn their feedback into something that is actionable. The first three best practices give you specific steps for how you can do this.

Figure 6: Three types of customer listening initiatives Best practices #1: take action on customer service complaintsThe customer who takes the time to complain is one who perceives a significant problem with their experience. In fact, according to the same Harris Interactive survey as mentioned on page 4 above, nearly 4 in 5 (78 percent) who experience problems completing mobile transactions share those experiences with others.5 As a result, customer experience management leaders have long recognized contact centers as valuable sources of information. They have created customer listening initiatives with clearly defined processes for investigating customer complaints and acting upon them. However, it is not always clear what really happened when a customer complains about his or her experience online.

Phase 3 – AnswersIn this phase, you use insights gleaned from IBM Tealeaf solutions to implement changes that can deliver real improvements to your online customer experience. In this phase you:

• Fix the problems identified during the Insight phase to optimize customer experience.

• Follow up with affected customers to either prevent defection or recover lost sales.

• Take steps to proactively identify the same or similar problems going forward.

Figure 5: The Components of the Answers phase

Twelve best practicesAcross Visibility, Insight and Answers we offer twelve best practices you should perform in order to conduct effective customer behavior analysis. As we discuss each, we will give real-world examples of how leading companies were able to gain unique insights using IBM Tealeaf solutions and measurably improve their results by doing so. We will also present a roadmap for putting some of these best practices into place now and implementing others over time as your customer experience management processes mature.

Visibility: best practicesCompanies can become aware of customer experience issues in a number of ways: by listening to customers, conducting regular customer experience reviews on their own, by optimizing site metrics in a top-down manner, or by


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Case study: leisure travel retailer In 2007 the UK’s most popular leisure travel retailer launched a new website to provide enhanced functionality for its one million visitors per week. After the new site went live, they began receiving e-mails and calls from customers reporting that the confirmation screen and e-mail they received included strange data instead of their personal information. For example, instead of saying, “Dear John” the email would say, “Dear First Name.” When the travel retailer’s IT team tried to reproduce the problem they were unable to isolate the issue.

The travel retailer turned to IBM Tealeaf solutions to conduct further analysis of the problem. Because the call center had the names of people reporting the issue, it was easy to pick a few examples, and then use IBM Tealeaf solutions to replay those visits. This enabled the travel retailer to discover that, occasionally, the site would malfunction between the “enter personal details” and “payment” steps in the booking process. When this happened the customer’s information would be replaced with the “Dear First Name” data rather than the actual details. The visibility IBM Tealeaf solutions provided allowed the travel retailer to halt a customer experience flaw that was increasing inquiries to the call center and eroding customer satisfaction. Furthermore, because IBM Tealeaf solutions allowed them to view and replay affected sessions, the travel retailer’s IT team no longer had to try and reproduce the problem, and could instead focus on higher-value enhancements to the site.

Best practices include formalizing the process of tracking and escalating customer issues that originate in the contact center. This includes:

• Developing a defined process for what information needs to be gathered (name, account number, etc.) to find the customer’s session within IBM Tealeaf solutions. Even anonymous sessions can be found if information unique to that session is gathered, for example what they searched for and the approximate time of their session.

• Verifying that call center representatives can escalate issues for investigation. Typically, this involves using a trouble ticket system, but regardless of the system there should be a process for capturing the necessary information and escalating the issue to the appropriate team.

• Having a person responsible for periodically examining trouble tickets to look for trends and identify common problem areas.

• Using IBM Tealeaf solutions to search for customer sessions that demonstrate the problem area and replay these sessions to see the actual customer experience that triggered a complaint.

• Leveraging the insight you gain from conducting customer behavior analysis to identify the issue.

Once you identify an issue, you can then move on to refine, quantify and diagnose that issue.

Best practices #2: investigate the information coming from Voice of Customer surveys and feedback formsBusinesses have long recognized the usefulness of Voice of the Customer (VOC) data collected through both formal and informal mechanisms. Customer surveys and online feedback forms have both proven their value to businesses that operate online. However, they do not always tell the full story about a particular problem.

For example, a customer survey may show that on average, customers think very poorly of your shipping policies. There may even be very specific feedback from online customers about concerns with your shipping costs. On the surface, your policies look the same as your competitors’. Could the low score stem from an incorrect shipping calculation? Or, are customers just confused by the information they get during the checkout process?

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Case study: online travel provider

In a real-world case, an online travel provider’s customer survey contained complaints from some customers that their search results listed hotels in the wrong city (for example, they would search for hotels in Atlanta and get hotels in Chicago). The provider could not reproduce the issue, and without further analysis the complaints would have gone unresolved.

This scenario would be very difficult to address without customer behavior analysis processes and supporting technology. While raw numerical data (i.e., ratings in surveys) and free-form feedback both provide great insight, they often do not provide enough information to understand how to resolve the problem or determine how many other people are affected. However, this e-business used customer behavior analysis processes to take its investigation to the next level.

Using IBM Tealeaf solutions, the travel provider discovered that the users who complained had actually started their searches from an affiliate partner’s site. This one affiliate was appending extra characters at the end of the search string, and therefore the search was not providing the right results. To add insult to injury, the travel provider was paying the affiliate for these bad searches!

These examples show why deeper analysis of customer survey and feedback forms is a best practice. This includes:

• Checking survey data for problem areas that affect customer experience.

• Reviewing free-text feedback responses that either highlight problem areas or prompt you to ask why?

• Using IBM Tealeaf solutions to generate a segment of customer sessions associated with these areas and/or associated with low-scoring responders.

• Leveraging IBM Tealeaf solutions to replay representative sessions and look for customer experience obstacles that can explain the scores or feedback you received.

Once you identify an issue, you can then move on to refine, quantify and diagnose that issue. IBM Tealeaf solutions help you to smoothly incorporate this level of analysis into surveys conducted using OpinionLab or iPerceptions VoC solutions. IBM® Tealeaf® cxConnect for Voice of Customer enables you to pivot directly from survey responses to a respondent’s session even if the respondent’s session was anonymous. And, if you set persistent cookies on your site, you would even be able to look at the respondent’s previous sessions as well.

Figure 7: Pivoting from an OpinionLab survey directly to Tealeaf cxConnect for Voice of Customer


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Best practices #3: do not miss the boat by ignoring customer comments in public forumsThe Internet has allowed businesses of all kinds to gather more information about what their customers think of them than was in the possible in the past. Customers are expressing their opinions in blogs, communities and a variety of other public forums. You do not need to pay to capture this information; all you need to do is listen.

Case study: European airline

Consider this scenario. A major European airline regularly monitors FlyerTalk.com and found that forum members were posting that its website was terrible because they could not book tickets on it. The posters would get the message “town invalid” when they tried to complete their booking forms. This feedback made no sense to the airline because its web analytics and performance management systems showed only a slight uptick in bookings failures.

Fortunately, this airline was serious about customer listening and had deployed IBM Tealeaf solutions to support its CEM strategy. After searching for online customers who received the “town invalid” message and replaying some of these failed sessions, the airline quickly discovered the problem: the town field on the address form was not accepting hyphens and dashes. When flyers from these hyphenated towns were getting the resulting “town invalid” message, the majority of them abandoned their purchases. Fixing this single customer experience flaw recaptured at least £30,000 per week in lost bookings.

The following best practices apply to analyzing customer data in public forums:

• Take advantage of any names, e-mail addresses or other information given by customers in public forums – any information that can be used to find their online experience – and use IBM Tealeaf solutions to reproduce the experience they actually had.

• Use these forums to look for trends in complaints. If you do see such a trend, you can often find problems by looking for sessions based on where the customer was on your site, what they did (and commented about) or other information about them that is available, such as their location. IBM Tealeaf solutions enable you to search sessions and drill-down based on each of these types of attributes.

Once you identify an issue, you can then move on to refine, quantify and diagnose that issue.

Regular experience reviewsCEM leaders do not just listen; they also proactively engage in regular reviews of their customer experience. Just as retailers observe shoppers in a physical store and banks listen to select customer interactions in their call centers, e-businesses can get very valuable information simply by watching what their customers do on their sites. Most e-businesses understand the strengths and weaknesses of their sites and have hypotheses about where they need to make improvements. Regular experience reviews, whether through usability testing or direct customer observation, give them a way to investigate their hypotheses further. Best practices #4 and #5 serve to create a structure for regular experience reviews so that they lead to real answers and actionable next steps.

Best practices #4: drill into the hypotheses you develop during usability testingE-businesses know that usability testing improves customer experience. Usability testing provides e-businesses with useful qualitative data on the barriers to customer success. However, without a clear quantitative picture of each problem identified, they may struggle to prioritize recommended changes and put them into action. For example, if five out of 15 users in the usability lab are running into trouble in the checkout process, does it really mean that a third of all site users are having the same problem? What percentage of people experiencing the problem actually abandoned their purchases? Even if a third of site users are affected, the problem may only have an impact on one percent of sales.

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Best practices #5: observe and review actual customer behaviorOne of the best ways to understand the challenges that your customers face is by actually watching them use your site. IBM Tealeaf solutions make it possible to put into practice the type of regular experience review that has worked so well in the offline world: direct customer observation.

Many of the customer experience managers with which we work have established a weekly customer experience review as a best practice. This typically includes:

• Gathering the site’s key stakeholders in a weekly meeting.• Selecting one suspected trouble spot to investigate. For

example, they may have seen a downturn in new registered users and want to review the registration process. Or, perhaps the hypothesis could come from an informal source such as the CEO’s spouse who had trouble registering.

• Using IBM Tealeaf solutions to search for sessions which demonstrate potentially bad experiences. For example, you could search for customers that abandoned the registration process after trying it three times. If the CEO’s spouse was just one of many customers who tried several times to register, the team knows there could be a problem.

• Selecting 20 or so sessions from this list and watching the users’ actual experiences going through the registration process.

• Using IBM Tealeaf solutions to look for other potential problems beyond the one that drove this investigation. Otherwise, you may only end up finding the problems you are looking for. Our customers have found that the most interesting issues or obstacles facing their customers are often ones uncovered during these investigations.

• Leveraging the insight gained to clarify what problems or issues with this process need improvement. You should also look at what is working well; you get ideas that you can leverage across the site.

• Choosing two or three specific things to investigate in depth based on what you learned in this review.

There are some other limitations to usability testing; namely, people tend to behave differently in a lab environment. Direct observation of actual online customers complements usability testing by addressing these key limitations.

Our best practices for enhancing usability testing are to:

• Use IBM Tealeaf solutions to get a quantitative understanding of the magnitude of the problem seen in the usability lab. By searching for customers who exhibited the same behavior as those who experienced the problem identified in the usability lab, IBM Tealeaf solutions can help determine if the issue is impacting a statistically significant number of people.

• Then, use IBM Tealeaf solutions to get a better understanding of the business impact of the problem. For example, after identifying a checkout problem in the lab, replay actual user sessions to see what happens and determine if the problem causes these customers to abandon their purchases. How much lost business do these abandoned purchases represent?

Once you identify an issue, you can then move on to refine and diagnose that issue. IBM Tealeaf solutions can marry the valuable qualitative data from the usability lab with the quantitative impact analysis to drive change.

Case study: insurance provider

A prominent insurance company conducted usability testing on its new “premium payment” process – the new application passed without incident. However, once live, the company experienced a lower than expected conversion rate. Using IBM Tealeaf solutions, the company began to examine abandoned user sessions which led to an interesting finding: many real customers were not seeing the “Make Payment” button placed at the bottom of the page but instead were clicking on the “Payment” tab in the site’s top navigation. On a daily basis, approximately 65 customers were clicking the wrong button and ending up in a frustrating endless loop. With the help of IBM Tealeaf solutions , the company was able to see why the navigation was confusing to customers and take the necessary steps to redesign the page to resolve this customer experience flaw.


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How many sessions should I replay?

For most sites, it is impossible to look at every session where a problem might have occurred; after all, you may have tens of thousands of visitors abandoning at a specific step in just hours. Fortunately, the laws of statistics dictate that something that is affecting your business in a significant way will become apparent by reviewing a limited number of sessions with IBM Tealeaf solutions.

If an issue is large enough to have a significant impact on your business, then that issue will be affecting a significant number of your customers. For example, a retail site would not see its order rate drop significantly if only a few customers were having an issue. In fact, an issue that lowers your order rate by just 5 percent must be affecting at least one in twenty customers. By reviewing a sample of only 15 to 30 sessions, the probability of identifying this issue is extremely high (almost 80 percent). If the change in order or conversion rates is even higher, then even fewer sessions need to be reviewed.

The chart below shows how many sessions should be replayed for a given change in conversion rate, if your underlying problem is causing 100 percent of shoppers to abandon.

E-businesses that follow this best practice are often able to address suspected problems before they have a major impact on business. And, they are often surprised at the magnitude of previously unknown problems they discover during the process.

Case study: online travel provider

An online travel provider knew that its customers were having problems with the registration process, but was not sure why. The company decided to evaluate this part of its site during its regular customer experience review. After replaying several abandoned registrations using IBM Tealeaf solutions, it found a common thread: customers were seeing an “invalid e-mail address” message and trying to enter their e-mail addresses in new and creative ways – all to no avail. The company then looked up some of the email accounts that customers were entering and found that these people already had accounts.

The travel provider knew that its vacation travelers visited the site infrequently and often could not remember that they already had registered accounts. The insight the company got by replaying sessions made it clear that they needed to design the registration process with existing users in mind. Simply by changing the “invalid e-mail address” message to “e-mail already in use” and implementing better processes for existing users to recover their usernames and passwords, the travel provider was able to drive a significant increase in conversion rates.

Optimizining site metricsMost e-businesses pay a lot of attention to their key site metrics: conversion rates, task completion rates, month-over-month growth and more. Indeed, the first step to optimizing is measuring. Top-down site metrics enable companies to track the health of their businesses on an ongoing basis. Those e-businesses that are taking CEM to the next level know that they must also understand what is underneath their key metrics. They need to know not just what but why if they are to take effective action to improve customer experience and success.

Figure 8: Probability of observing an issue by using IBM Tealeaf solutions to replay sessions

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Other KPIs are based on “known bad experiences” that can be tracked such as:

• Technicalissues: examples include slow page performance, global error pages, or unexpected error messages such as “SQL exception.”

• Businessissues:these vary depending on the type of site and industry but could include seeing an out-of-stock message on a retail site, having an itinerary re-priced on a travel site, or having account qualification issues on a financial services site.

• Customerissues: actual customer behavior that indicates a bad experience such as going to the customer feedback form or help page.

A final set of KPIs are based on unexpected outcomes – outcomes that deviate from the defined business processes on the site. Potential problem areas include:

• Validatingstepswithheavyback-endprocessing: for example, checkout on a retail site or purchase itinerary on a travel site. If the next page shown to the user is not a purchase confirmation, something went wrong.

• Validatingstepsafterpartneractivity:for example, payment processing for a credit card. Once this partner activity completes, the expected behavior would be that the customer would return to the site’s process.

Case study: major online travel provider

A major online travel provider uses IBM Tealeaf solutions to track a KPI for validating itinerary purchases. Many tasks happen during the final step in a travel purchase: accessing airline and hotel reservation systems, validating information entered, processing credit card information and more. Small glitches in any of these tasks can prevent the transaction from being processed completely. Simply by tracking whether customers went to a purchase confirmation page after they clicked on the purchase button, the travel provider was able to identify glitches that represented millions of dollars of lost business.

Best practices #6: monitor your customer experience Key Performance IndicatorsCEM leaders know that there are a number of factors that affect their customers’ online experience – and thus their ability to retain these customers or sell more to them. They have set up Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure the incidence of these factors and identify changes or trends. At the simplest level, this can be just tracking overall page performance metrics on the site; but there are many other metrics that can be of even greater importance to track customer experience and identify potential issues and problems.

The KPIs we describe below can be rolled up into a single overall customer experience KPI that you can track for your site.

Common KPIs are set up around “known bad behaviors” such as:

• Multipleattemptsofkeyprocesseswithoutsuccess: for example, a user tried to log in three times and failed, a user searched for a product three times without getting any results, a user went through the purchase process three times but never purchased, etc.

• Multipleattemptstosubmitaformwithoutsuccess:for example, a user received a form validation message such as “enter valid address” more than three times, a user was asked to accept payment terms more than three times, etc.


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• Set up dashboards and alerts for every team member who is responsible for KPIs. Alerts can be effective to reduce the need to visually monitor these KPIs. Otherwise, you should define a standard frequency for visually monitoring the KPIs.

• Roll-up customer experience KPIs to report to management. Management should not look at individual KPIs for unexpected outcomes, but they should care about an overall KPI for site user experience. IBM Tealeaf solutions can create scorecards that roll up individual KPIs and assign a grade in each major category. This can be much more valuable to management than tracking very basic customer experience metrics like page performance.

• Investigate changes in KPIs. When a KPI goes out of its historical norm, the assigned owner can use the IBM Tealeaf solution to investigate this change. He or she would use the same techniques described in the best practices for understanding conversion rates (best practices #7) to look at a sample of customer sessions that represent the change in the KPI.

Some customer experience KPIs are captured today by existing web analytics or performance management tools; however, many cannot be tracked without a CEM tool. IBM Tealeaf CEM solutions are particularly effective at tracking KPIs of customer behavior and unanticipated events such as unexpected outcomes, unexpected error messages or unexpected behaviors.

One of the the most important best practices for customer experience KPIs is to track them; too many e-businesses do not because they do not know how to capture the information. Steps for tracking KPIs include:

• Work with your entire e-business team to define appropriate customer experience KPIs for different organizations and groups. You should limit the number of KPIs that any one group must track. Keep in mind that not everyone will look at every KPI.

• Once you determine what is appropriate, you can assign owners to track each one and take action if they deviate from their norms. Norms will be dependent on the KPI, but you should define what is expected and how to identify spikes and significant changes.

Figure 9: A customer experience KPI scorecard

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Furthermore, the customer experience problems that are hardest to understand involve factors that the e-business is not tracking. They are unanticipated. If these factors are not tagged, they cannot be analyzed or even identified using web analytics tools. No e-business can tag every component of its customer experience for web analytics; but it is the things that are not being tracked that are often the most likely to go wrong because no one is thinking about them at all.

Using IBM Tealeaf solutions together with web analytics

E-businesses that are evaluating IBM Tealeaf solutions are sometimes confused about how the solutions and web analytics complement each other and where they overlap. While IBM Tealeaf solutions do capture much of the same data, the solutions have very different capabilities because they focus on solving different problems.

Understanding customer behavior requires both a quantitative and a qualitative understanding. Web analytics tools are good for aggregating large amounts of click-stream data to provide a top-down picture of the businesses. Meanwhile, IBM Tealeaf solutions enable companies to investigate the trends observed through web analytics: from which and where to why.

Using these two tools in concert brings together quantitative and qualitative data in a way that gets to answers faster, so that the e-business can quickly take actions to improve customer experience and success. Web analytics solutions facilitate Visibility, while IBM Tealeaf solutions afford Insight and Answers.

Case study: communications company

The marketing team at a leading communications company noticed a rise in the number of customers going through the subscriber process multiple times before abandoning. Traditional segmentation methods were not helpful in determining why, but the visual replay available through IBM Tealeaf solutions gave the team the answer.

With an IBM Tealeaf solution in place, the company was able to discover an endless loop in the “new subscriber” process. Once new subscribers enter their payment information, the last step before order completion, they are supposed to enter a date for equipment delivery. However, when new subscribers neglected to schedule a date, they ended up in an endless loop. Several potential new customers per day were caught in this ‘no man’s land.’ Fixing this one customer experience issue allowed the company to recover more than $220K in otherwise lost revenue per year.

Best practices #7: investigate changes or differences in conversion ratesConversion rates and task success rates are the lifeblood of a successful online business. As such, many businesses have already invested in web analytics tools and dashboards so that they can track these metrics on a continuous basis. They know that when they see a sudden change in conversion rates or other success rates, they need to quickly investigate why.

Web analytics tools do a good job of providing a top-level view of the health of an e-businesses and tracking changes in these metrics over time. They also do a good job of “slicing-and-dicing” – enabling the e-business to find the customer segment that is most representative of a change. You can look at differences across specific products or product categories; new versus existing customers; geographic region; day of the week; where the customer came from (for example, from Google versus from a banner ad); and virtually any other segment that you define in the tool. However, web analytics tools do not tell you why customers in these segments behaved differently.


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• If you cannot find segment differences with the quantitative data from web analytics, the qualitative data you gain by using IBM Tealeaf solutions may give you insights on where to look for problems. You may review a few sessions; see something that is going wrong; and use IBM Tealeaf solutions to search for other sessions where the same thing went wrong. This is how you find and refine problems with the type of variables that web analytics do not track.

• Once you have insight into the problem, use IBM Tealeaf solutions to quantify the impact of it. The impact of the problem should correlate with the overall change in conversion rate.

IBM® Tealeaf® cxConnect for Web Analytics makes it easier for companies using IBM Digital Analytics, Omniture, or WebTrends solutions to implement these best practices for customer behavior analysis. Through integrations with these three web analytics tools, you can drill directly from analytics data into the actual customer experience information captured by Tealeaf cxConnect for Web Analytics for a particular customer segment.

Figure 10: Pivoting from an Omniture funnel report to Tealeaf cxConnect for Web Analytics for session review

Case study: automotive retailer

A major automotive retailer noticed a high number of abandonments on the last step of the checkout process but had no way to determine what was causing the problem with its existing site tools. After deploying the IBM Tealeaf solution and using it to replay a select group of users who abandoned on the last step, they recognized a pattern: no debit card user was able to complete a transaction successfully. Upon further analysis via the IBM Tealeaf solution, the company discovered that its application was not built to handle debit cards and their required PINs. Because debit cards were accepted in the company’s stores, they were automatically added to the list of payment options on the site. However, a form field and logic to accept PIN numbers had been overlooked. The company was able to save over $4,000 of lost sales per day by identifying and resolving this one site experience problem.

CEM leaders have recognized the value of using both web analytics tools and IBM Tealeaf solutions so that they have a full picture of what is happening on their sites and why. Working with them, we have defined these best practices:

• Define the key task completion rates for your site and use both the dashboard and alert features of your web analytics tool so that you know what those metrics are at any time.

• Define what constitutes a significant change to each of your task completion rates by analyzing the existing benchmarks you have in place.

• Put in place processes for investigating any significant change quickly and to investigate any unexpected, significant difference in task completion rates between segments. Always ask why.

• Use your web analytics tool to isolate the difference to as small a customer segment as possible. Enlarging the percentage difference in task completion rates between segments makes it easier to identify the problem with visual replay (see the discussion at the beginning of this paper on estimating the number of sessions to view).

• Replay a sample of sessions in the problem segment to visualize the customer experience and look for unexpected behavior.

• Look at the whole user session, not just the step where the problem occurred. Often, a problem occurs long before it results in an abandonment.

Investigate:• A 5 percent drop in success rates, or• A difference between segments, or• A difference between tests

Then, within the IBM Tealeaf solution, create a representative customer segment and replay samples to observe the customer experience problem.

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Best practices #8: dig below the surface of a/b and multivariate testing resultsMany companies are utilizing A/B or multivariate testing results to make decisions about website designs and online marketing strategies. For example, a business might use A/B testing to try different promotions on its home page or to select a new design for a checkout process. With either method, they are making critical decisions based on one metric alone: did the variable perform well or not?

Case study: Rightmove The following is from the blog, Web Analytics Princess by Marianina Manning6, who is responsible for web analytics and customer experience at Rightmove. The entry describes how she investigated the results of a multivariate test with an IBM Tealeaf solution. Unsure why property renters were converting at a higher rate than property buyers, the Tealeaf IBM solution allowed Marianina to discover that a content feature about energy efficiency, which appeared only occasionally, was distracting attention from the call to action.

Investigate:• A 5 percent drop in success rates, or• A difference between segments, or• A difference between tests


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The following best practices address how to set up the right kind of tracking and how to evaluate application health in the context of business impact.

Best practices #9: investigate application log errorsError logs contain valuable information about what happened on your site. However, application problems do not always translate into poor customer experience; and problems that do cause poor customer experience do not always get logged. For example, a server might have gone down unexpectedly for an hour, but were customers actually affected? Or 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 invalid user credentials, did customers see errors or did exception handling work properly?

Best practices involve digging below application errors to get real answers. IBM Tealeaf solutions enable you to answer the types of questions listed above. If a server went down, you can use an IBM Tealeaf solution to search for customers who started their sessions on that server just before it went down. By replaying their sessions, you can see the event from their perspective and gain insight into questions such as:

• 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 more importantly, you can analyze the overall impact to your business: as a group, did they convert at a lower rate than expected?

However, further validation should be conducted. Many businesses have found unexpected behavior or unplanned results when they use an IBM Tealeaf solution to conduct deeper customer behavior analysis, as Rightmove did. As a best practice, you should look not just at which variable performed best but also ask why a particular variable worked well or poorly.

• Use the IBM Tealeaf solution to find a select group of sessions to investigate – for example, users who got the new functionality (that is being tested before being rolled out to all users on the site), but who still abandoned the purchase process.

• Replay a sampling of those sessions to see what actually happened. The number of sessions to replay is dependent on how large a difference was seen in conversion rates (or task completion rates) in the variable that performed well or poorly. Use the same techniques described in the best practices for understanding conversion rates (best practice #7).

• After investigating why the variable did well or poorly, you might come to a decision to revise the test and run it again before fully deploying the best-performing variable.

Monitoring application healthE-businesses understand the importance of monitoring their applications and systems at all times so that they can respond to problems immediately. Most of them track a common set of site metrics using performance management tools: application performance, response time, error rates and other IT-oriented metrics. While these metrics are very important, they do not tell e-business leaders much about actual online customer experience and the business impact of a change in a key metric.

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• 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. Some e-businesses even have a standard format for error pages or a standard comment in the page so that they can set the IBM Tealeaf solution up to handle future error pages in advance.

• Unexpected error messages or pages: It is hard to anticipate every error in advance; each of our customers can see unexpected errors at some point. IBM Tealeaf solutions have a number of unexpected errors set up with built-in alerts, for example “SQL Error.” Our customers have also found it helpful to search in the IBM Tealeaf solution on keywords such as “sorry” or “apologize;” as they have found new error conditions in this way.

• Known bad status codes, such as a 500 error. These codes are also built into IBM Tealeaf solutions by default.

• 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. IBM Tealeaf solutions have slow performance built in as a default condition.

Using IBM Tealeaf solutions, you can track these types of potential issues in real-time. You can define thresholds for each issue and set up the IBM Tealeaf solution to send out alerts via e-mail or to systems management consoles when the

Case study: financial services customer

A financial services organization which uses IBM Tealeaf solutions tracks all of its 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 uses IBM Tealeaf solutions to investigate and quantify the impact on actual customers. This approach helps to ensure that service level agreements have real meaning to IT and clear benefits to the business.

Best practices #10: respond in real-time to known technical issuesIT teams know about a host of conditions and errors that lead to poor customer experience. If a customer is seeing messages such as “Invalid SQL” or “Sorry, Page Not Found,” he or she is probably not accomplishing the task that he or she wanted to accomplish. There are many other known technical and application issues that affect customer experience which should be tracked so that if significant numbers of customers experience them, IT knows immediately and can work to resolve them. Existing tools track some, but not all, of these conditions today, and IT may have to go to several tools to understand what is happening.

CEM leaders have established processes for tracking and investigating potential technical issues with IBM Tealeaf solutions. They have set their IBM Tealeaf solution up to scan for the messages associated with them and send alerts when customers encounter them. The types of issues to look for include:

Figure 11: An alert delivered to IT staff from IBM Tealeaf solutions.


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To summarize, the best practices for responding to known technical issues in real-time include the following steps:

• 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.

• Periodically use IBM Tealeaf solutions to uncover other errors that are not being tracked by searching for messages like “sorry” and “apologize” that often accompany error messages.

• Set up events and alerts within IBM Tealeaf solutions so that the right people get real-time alerts when known errors exceed defined thresholds. These thresholds can be determined 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.

Insight: best practicesThroughout the first ten best practices, we have described how companies can use IBM Tealeaf solutions to conduct deep, customer behavior analysis based on information they have observed through a variety of mechanisms. At this point, CEM leaders are past just knowing there is a problem and have moved on to understanding exactly what the problem is. The next step is to quantify the customer experience problem.

thresholds are exceeded. Many of our customers base these thresholds on previous activity, triggering an alert when the percentage of customers getting an error page exceeds 10 percent of the maximum percentage in the past month. Once you become aware of a potential issue, IBM Tealeaf solutions provide the context for where customers are encountering obstacles. This helps you to understand the business impact and find the underlying problem.

It is very important to understand the impact of technical problems on your 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.

Case study: leading provider of financial settlement solutions

This leading provider of financial settlement solutions and data analysis services to the travel industry is a CEM pioneer. 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, this company’s customers (travel agents) who saw this message would call the customer service center. But the 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.

Using the real-time alerting capability of IBM Tealeaf solutions, this company’s production support team was able to establish a new, proactive approach to the problem. Now, each 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.

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Case study: online art retailer This online art retailer operates two websites which generate significant traffic via search engines. Many of these indexed links send a user directly to specific product pages within one of the respective sites. However, the inventory on these sites is incredibly dynamic, with products constantly going in and out of stock. Because the search engine indices cannot keep up, the first impression many customers get is a “sorry this product is no longer available” message. While reviewing customer sessions, the user experience team at the art retailer 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 an IBM Tealeaf solution. 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 reprioritize 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.

IBM Tealeaf solutions enabled the company to turn a formerly unfriendly, negative experience into a more positive, pro-shopping experience for its customers. In addition, the art retailer was able to realize a greater return on their SEO/SEM customer acquisition programs.

Our best practices for quantifying the business impact of a problem are:

• Once a customer experience problem has been identified, use IBM Tealeaf solutions 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 enables you to calculate the approximate overall loss for a given period of time because of this issue.

Best practices #11: prioritize customer experience issues based on business impactAlmost every business has limited time and budget to focus on optimizing their customers’ experience. They may have a long list of issues to address and do not know where to start. Quantification of the business impact of each issue is most often the missing link that prevents e-businesses from prioritizing the most important issues or even from addressing some issues at all.

In many of the examples we have reviewed so far, our customers were able to use IBM Tealeaf solutions not just to understand why a particular trend or problem was occurring, but also to see what the impact was to their businesses. They were following this best practice: prioritize your customer experience issues based on the business impact. For each issue, you should 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 between visitors

who experience the issue and those who do not?• 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 the cost of fixing the issue compare to lost sales/profits?

IBM Tealeaf solutions enable you to find customers who experienced a specific issue and understand how the issue affected their ability to complete their transaction. This information leads to a clearly quantifiable business case that becomes a tool for setting customer experience optimization priorities. With the insight you gain with the help of IBM Tealeaf solutions, you can invest your resources to make optimum improvements.


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Customer follow-up can also be simple or complex, depending on the nature of the problem. In some cases, it can even enable you to deepen your customer relationships.

Best-practice #12: think creatively about turning analysis into customer retention initiativesBecause IBM Tealeaf solutions can tell you exactly which customers experienced a particular problem, it gives you opportunities to design programs that recover lost orders or improve customer retention. You can not only drive new business but also build trust with your customers.

Answers: best practicesTaking action to fix a customer experience problem may be as simple as making a minor site enhancement or as complex as redesigning a key process. In the Answers phase, you may also be conducting new or updated multivariate tests that feed new information into the Visibility phase. Armed with business impact quantification discussed in best practice #11, you can implement a solution that provides positive return on investment with respect to the problem it solves.

Each customer experience problem that you identify, understand and solve also provides you with a learning opportunity. You can design new customer experience KPIs and trigger new alerts that allow you to be proactive about a particular issue and similar ones in the future.

Figure 12: Conduct business impact assessments within IBM Tealeaf solutions to prioritize customer experience issues

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clear processes and investing in IBM Tealeaf solutions as the foundation for tracking the right information, performing customer behavior analysis and quantifying impact. As they became successful in this “reactive” problem resolution, they began to find more and more opportunities to proactively optimize their customer experiences.

We define the path that our customers have followed as the following levels of maturity:

• Reactive problem resolution• Active alerting and issue monitoring• Proactive discovery and analysis• Customer experience optimization

We have seen that e-businesses are most successful with CEM when they start out with high-value problem resolution processes. Specifically, they should:

• Set up clearly defined processes to take action on customer complaints.

• Investigate application log errors.• Set up alerts so that you can respond to known technical

issues.• Prioritize customer experience issues based on the business

impact.

Once you have put these four best practices in place, you should conduct quarterly customer experience reviews with your team. These reviews will lead you to the next best practices that can deliver the most value to your e-business.

As you gain more value from these best practices, you will need to invest more effort and focus to define the right processes, but you will also see much higher returns. Many companies benefit from outside expertise to help define customer experience optimization processes, so IBM has consulting partners who understand both our technology and best practices and can help their clients move along the maturity path more quickly.

Case study: online retailer

Consider the example of an online retailer that uses IBM Tealeaf solutions. During one of the retailer’s coupon e-mail campaigns, it did not properly activate the coupon code in its back-end system. Customers who tried to enter the coupon during checkout saw an “invalid coupon” message, which caused a majority of those customers to abandon the purchase altogether. Leveraging the real-time alerting capability of the IBM Tealeaf solution, the retailer was immediately notified about the drop in checkout conversion rates. With this information in hand, the retailer was able to use the software to search for the sessions of all the users who either entered the unique coupon code or saw the error message, “invalid coupon.” It identified 300 customers who abandoned purchases due to this error – representing $25,000 in potential revenue per day.

But IBM Tealeaf solutions also helped the retailer reverse a bad customer experience for those 300 customers. Because the IBM Tealeaf solution had recorded the information customers had entered before the coupon error message, the company had a list of all the affected customers’ e-mail addresses and was able to send them new incentives to purchase.

Our best practices for customer follow-up are to:

• After refining and quantifying, generate a list of the customers who were affected by a problem.

• Based on the list, determine if contact information is available for following up. Did customers provide their usernames? Was an e-mail address provided as part of the process?

• Determine if the customer completed the process at a later time or through another channel. IBM Tealeaf solutions can help determine if the visitor returned later and purchased online, but you will also need to look at other systems to determine if, for example, the customer called the contact center or visited a branch.

• Put together a follow-up program for customers who did not complete the process to encourage them to come back to the site and finish. When appropriate, this follow-up program might include some kind of promotion or discount.

Where should I start?The best practices we have described represent many years of evolution at hundreds of our customer sites. Virtually all of them started their customer experience initiatives by improving their ability to resolve customer problems: defining


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experience of every customer. With Cross-Channel Marketing Optimization customer relationship marketers can engage customers in a one-to-one dialogue across channels to grow revenue throughout the customer’s lifecycle. Price, Promotion and Product Mix Optimization allows merchandisers and sales planners to make price, promotion and product mix decisions that maximize profit and inventory utilization. And with Marketing Performance Optimization, marketing leaders, planners and decision-makers can model and assess mix, and manage marketing operations to maximize ROI.

Over 2,500 organizations around the world use IBM EMM solutions to help manage the pressures of increasing marketing complexity while delivering improved revenue and measurable results. IBM’s time-tested and comprehensive offerings are giving companies such as Dannon, E*TRADE, ING, Orvis, PETCO, Telefonica | Vivo, United Airlines and wehkamp.nl the power and flexibility required to provide their customers and prospects with what they expect today – a more consistent and relevant experience across all channels.

ConclusionWith the majority of e-businesses planning to spend more on customer experience this year7, now is the time to start taking a disciplined approach to CEM: both from a process perspective and from a systems perspective. The best practices we have described in this white paper should give you a clear path to this disciplined approach. The experience of our customers shows how IBM Tealeaf solutions sit at the foundation of customer experience observation, analysis and optimization.

About IBM Enterprise Marketing ManagementThe IBM Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) Suite is an end-to-end, integrated set of capabilities designed exclusively for the needs of marketing organizations. Integrating and streamlining all aspects of marketing, IBM’s EMM Suite empowers organizations and individuals to turn their passion for marketing into valuable customer relationships and more profitable, efficient, timely, and measurable business outcomes.

Delivered on premises or in the Cloud, the IBM EMM Suite of software solutions gives marketers the tools and insight they need to create individual customer value at every touch. The IBM EMM Suite helps marketers to understand customer wants and needs and leverage that understanding to engage buyers in highly relevant, interactive dialogs across digital, social, and traditional marketing channels.

Designed to address the specific needs of particular marketing and merchandising users, the IBM EMM Suite is comprised of five individual solutions. Digital Marketing Optimization enables digital marketers to orchestrate relevant digital interactions to attract and retain new visitors and grow revenue throughout the customer’s lifecycle. With Customer Experience Optimization eCommerce professionals can turn visitors into repeat customers and loyal advocates by improving the digital

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1 Navigate The Future Of Customer Service February 01, 2013, By Kate Leggett with William Band, Sarah Bookstein; http://www.forrester.com/Navigate+The+Future+Of+Customer+Service/fulltext/-/E-RES61372.

2 Customer Experience Spending Intensifies in 2008; Forrester Research, Inc.; February 26, 2008.

3 2011 Harris Interactive Survey of Mobile Transactions, February 2011.



6 Marianina Manning’s blog entry can be found at: http://marianina.com/blog/2008/02/12/reliving-my-customers-experience-and-some-nice-screenshots/

7 Customer Experience Spending Intensifies in 2008; Forrester Research, Inc.; February 26, 2008.

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Establishing a disciplined approach to online customer experience