“Tealeaf’s solution has an economic model that is hard to resist in this most challenging market where investment in IT is generally flat, or modest at best.”-- Marnie Barrett, CIO, Levenger
Customer Profile - Founded in 1987 and headquartered in Delray Beach, Florida, Levenger is a catalog company, an Internet company and a retail concern. The company’s mission is to create and sell meaningful products for the productive enjoyment of reading, writing and working with ideas.
Vendor Profile - Tealeaf is the leading provider of online customer experience management solutions. Tealeaf's CX family of solutions provides unprecedented enterprise-wide visibility into every user's unique online interactions. This “360-degree view” of the online customer experience enables a clear and consistent understanding of the customer for ebusiness, IT, customer service and legal and compliance executives and their organizations across a wide range of vertical industries including retail, banking, travel, insurance, telecommunications, pharmaceutical and transportation. Founded in 1999, Tealeaf is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and is privately-held.
RETURN ON INVESTMENTS
- 90% reduction in time to identify site errors.
- Immediate ability to correct errors on production site before customers report them.
- Increased productivity of development team by an estimated 20-30%.
- Direct impact on protecting revenue stream for retailer.
Overview
As Levenger CIO Marnie Barrett recounts, “Tealeaf immediately brought value to Levenger that hit on several hot buttons: ROI, improved technical support tools, and quality assurance monitoring.”
When a web application problem occurs, Levenger’s team moves quickly to resolve the issue, and satisfy the customer who was affected by that problem. That is why Levenger is pleased that their implementation of Tealeaf has enabled them to reduce the time it takes to resolve a problem by 90 percent.
Prior to having Tealeaf on board, Levenger relied on customer cooperation to report and resolve problems.
“To find the problem, you had to email the customer back and forth to get enough information to know where to begin,” explains Lynnette Montgomery, Levenger’s Internet manager. “A customer doesn’t have time to be emailing you about your problems.”
IMMEDIATE ROI
After using Tealeaf for only 30 days, Levenger reported experiencing a 90 percent reduction in the time it took to reproduce and communicate site-related problems.
Levenger received enormous value in the ability to monitor their newly designed web site during the production rollout. The ability to immediately see what users were doing on the web site, along with the ability to monitor, capture and correct the errors as they happened brought unprecedented and richly informative session views to the web team during this critical rollout. To the IT team, this all added up to quickly correcting technical and logic errors on the site before customers reported them.
Levenger has been able to correlate application failures to actual users, thereby freeing up valuable IT time that would normally have been spent on problem identificaion. With a limited IT staff, this benefit has already translated into higher productivity of the web team by redirecting efforts away from troubleshooting to activities that will add revenue.
CIO Barrett has reported continuing productivity improvements for her development team, and notes the positive role Tealeaf has played in proactively monitoring the site while also improving communications between customer support and IT.
Looking down the road to additional ROI gains, Levenger has rolled out Tealeaf to its customer service representative (CSR) group. According to Montgomery, “CSRs can identify with certainty what really is the problem, instead of having to guess, and can tell the customer what to do to correct it.”
ISSUE NO. 1—DUPLICATE CHARGES THREATEN TO DRIVE AWAY SALES
Problem
Levenger had a problem with the shopping cart in the “Ship To” section of the web site, but only its customers knew. Unbeknownst to Levenger, when a customer selected the button for “shipping address is same as billing address’ and also completed the “ship to” section, the system doubled the express shipping charges for all products ordered.
Solution
Using Tealeaf, the customers who would have complained about shipping charges (or simply cancelled their purchase) were rapidly identified by the IT team. IT then isolated the problem by replaying the real-user sessions, which revealed exactly what the customers were actually experiencing. The problem was quickly remedied without any system downtime.
Benefit
According to Levenger’s Montgomery, “Historically, there was one big problem with not being able to capture user experiences on the web site. If you can’t find it, you can’t fix it.” With Tealeaf, Montgomery is confident of being able to find and fix any customer of technical problem related to the Levenger website.
ISSUE NO. 2—TEALEAF MAKES FOR SOME “QUICK SAVES”
Problem
Levenger received a call from a customer with a phone order for $100 who relayed his frustration with having unsuccessfully tried to place a $250 order minutes before via the web site.
Solution
A quick-acting Levenger representative used Tealeaf’s replay mechanism to view the user’s exact session, then contacted the customer and offered to complete the original order. The customer received a complete recap of all the items in his cart in an immediate email, and opted to cancel his lesser phone order, and go with the larger web order.
Benefit
With critical online retail applications every single “hitch” or error in an application can translate to a lost order, or even worse—a lost customer. Tealeaf gives customers like Levenger the power to understand exactly what the customer is experiencing, thereby, increasing the accuracy of its applications and preserving precious revenue.
ISSUE NO. 3—USER ERROR OR NOT, IT‘S THE RETAILER’S PROBLEM
Problem
Whether it is a system error or a user error, if your company can’t take sales over the Internet, it’s your problem. Levenger often employs Tealeaf to identify a customer problem, only to learn that a customer is checking the wrong box, or using an incorrect format. Case in point: Levenger received an email from a customer who was unable to enter their credit card expiration date, and was ready to simply “click” away and ditch the entire sale.
Solution
The Levenger IT team quickly worked with the customer, reviewed the exact transaction the customer had experienced, and easily discerned that the problem was simply a formatting issue. The customer re-entered their expiration date using the proper four-digit format, and everything was solved.
Benefit
Saving a customer from “clicking” away not only saves that particular sale, but future sales over the life of that customer. Tealeaf’s value can be directly correlated to saved sales, and protected revenue streams. Most importantly, Levenger now has insight into web application accuracy, which leads to site enhancements to prevent such application errors from ever reoccurring.









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