“Our implementation of Tealeaf has paid for itself many times over. With Tealeaf in place, identifying and resolving application issues that used to take days or weeks, now takes place in a matter of minutes. The savings are immeasurable.”-- Judy Renfrow, Web Application Analyst of IT Business Applications Organization, Texas Instruments
Customer Profile - Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) helps customers solve problems and develop new electronics that make the world smarter, healthier, safer, greener and more fun. A global semiconductor company, TI innovates through manufacturing, design and sales operations in more than 25 countries.
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
- Internal Web application support resources recovered.
- Persistent application issues identified and eliminated.
- Reduced IT time spent on complaints.
- Using Tealeaf to replay each and every questionable session, TI saves several hours when trying to tie together all the disparate components that comprised the users individual session.
Overview
Tealeaf is a key tool used in the support process of TI’s Web Basis application. Web Basis is an order management application built in-house for use by TI’s worldwide distributor network, external sales representatives, and internal sales representatives. The worldwide distributors come to the site to create and change quotes/orders for TI semiconductor products and to check backlog status. Therefore, this application has to be reliable, available and accurate twenty-fours a day, seven days a week.
Fundamentally, the application is a self- service replacement for a process that had formerly required proprietary equipment and personnel support. Web Basis was launched in 1999 and provided TI with a lower-cost interface that required fewer man-hours of support and maintenance.
Like any production application, changes are made on an ongoing basis. With each change, Judy Renfrow, web application analyst in the IT Business Applications Organization at Texas Instruments, must keep a close eye on how the end users are affected. Prior to installation of Tealeaf, that process was a matter of ‘wait and see.’ “With Tealeaf in place,” she says, “I can monitor the actual impact of changes made and be proactive about application issues.”
To ensure the health of Web Basis, TI has monitoring and testing tool products in place. While these tools allow them to test whether their systems are up or down and whether pages load properly, the tools don’t give TI the context of any single web application failure. By using Tealeaf to access real-time user sessions and diagnose the magnitude of a user problem, TI can determine which issues are minor and which are likely to affect additional users.
In 2002, Texas Instruments turned to Tealeaf, installing it on their IIS Web server to manage the accuracy of Web Basis transactions. Very quickly, they began seeing significant benefits. Tealeaf fundamentally changed their approach to application health, as illustrated by the following examples.
IMMEDIATE ROI
- Reducing the amount of time that IT had to spend on customer
complaints
- Prior to TeaLeaf, ongoing application and user errors drained internal resources, and challenged IT. Through replay and analysis, TI has been able to completely eliminate certain ongoing issues.
- By eliminating the guesswork and inaccurate user feedback in identifying, isolating, and repairing defects with the application, Tealeaf has reduced the amount of time spent by TI application support resources in chasing down and resolving elusive problems.
ISSUE NO. 1—IF YOU CAN’T FIND IT, YOU CAN’T FIX IT
Problem
Users don’t remember what they did leading up to a problem. To the web application analyst, it’s the most common of all problems. Absent the tools to address this problem, however, IT is forced to rely upon the unreliable memory of the end user combined with the disparate systems in place that the end user may or may not have encountered. According to Renfrow, “It is impossible to provide TI’s high standard for timely support if the end users do not remember their path sequence. At the same time, we shouldn’t be in the position of having to rely on our customers for that information.” In the world of B2C applications, at this point 96 percent of customers will simply walk away unsatisfied. In B2B cases such as this, end users will contact their partner company via more expensive channels such as telephone or help desk.
Solution
Because Tealeaf captures each and every transaction on Web Basis, whenever a transaction’s accuracy is called into question, the application analyst simply searches for the session via Tealeaf’s Google-like search capabilities, then replays the session—in its entirety and in context.
Benefit
“I wouldn’t expect our customers to remember every step they took as part of a transaction on our system any more than I would remember every step I took purchasing a CD on Amazon.com,” added Renfrow. Instead, Renfrow simply searches within the captured web sessions, quickly identifies the questionable session, and then immediately replays the session in its entirety. “Recreating a problem is invaluable,” added Renfrow. “With Tealeaf, what used to take us days is a 10–15 minute process.”
ISSUE NO. 2—TRANSACTION USAGE ANALYSIS
Problem
TI has SAP transaction usage statistics but there are some SAP reports that are not comprehended in these statistics. Since TI’s Web Basis system consists of several applications and reports, it can be difficult to know if the Web Basis system is providing the users with the right tools that they need to manage their TI business.
Solution
Tealeaf analyzes application behavior historically, allowing TI’s application analyst to determine which transactions are taking place, at what frequency, and with what results.
Benefit
By knowing the usage level of the Web Basis reports, TI is able to determine if rarely used reports need improvements that would result in enabling the Web Basis users to manage their TI business more efficiently.
ISSUE NO. 3—SELF-SERVICE REQUIRES SERVICE
Problem
Support calls for the same application malfunction were eating up resources, and resulting in disgruntled users. In one case, Web Basis users thought that they were not given access to the appropriate customer data. So, they would call up the help desk to find out what was wrong with the system.
Solution
With Tealeaf, replay and analysis showed this was an ongoing cause for support. According to Renfrow, the replay and analysis was invaluable for discovering that the Web Basis users were trying to access customer information that they were not entitled to view; yet, they were not being told why access was denied. They also found that there was customer data blocked that should be available. As a result, TI was able to modify one of the Web Basis reports, essentially removing subsequent requests for help in that area.
Benefit
Support calls for an entire category of problem no longer occur resulting in improved customer satisfaction and improved use of TI resources.
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