Check out how to use Tealeaf to understand your customer better than ever before. Whether you're a regular user following the general workflow or an analyst, we can show you how to make the most of Tealeaf for your business.

After you've learned the general workflows, you can start using Tealeaf to find and understand all of your customer struggles.

General workflow

1. Plan a new project.
   1. Agree on the scope by selecting the processes that support your most important business KPIs. Start small.
   2. Plan the dashboards and reports. What questions do you want to answer? For example:
      • How do you assess the health of the application and detect anomalies?
      • What reports do you need to track typical issues?
   3. Plan what events you need for the reports and the building block events to create them.
2. Start the project.
   1. Create basic events, such as detecting and capturing:
      • Each step in the process
      • Process completion confirmation
      • Process failure conditions
      • Whether a process was started (such as page opened, first form field completed)
      • Process abandonment. Track the last step before abandonment.
      • User information (such as name, e-mail address, phone number)
      • Business information (such as cart value, number of products)
      • Application use information (such as search terms and results)
      • System and application error messages
   2. Test the new events with the event tester. Make sure to include sessions for which events should fire as well as sessions for which events should not fire.
3. Analyze issues.
   1. Define dimensions to segment reports and help investigate issues, for example:
      • Browser, OS, device type
      • Process success, failure, and abandonment
      • Types of errors or struggle
   2. Define events to detect possible anomalies and struggle, for example:
      • Multiple attempts to start the process
      • Repeated process steps
      • Out of order execution of steps
      • Abandonment after completion of the last step (no order confirmation)
      • Repeatable errors
   3. Use replay and event tester to validate that those events are detecting struggles or issues your user is facing.
4. Analyze the business impact and build reports.
   1. Assess the business impact of detected issues, for example:
      • Is the issue in the session decreasing conversion?
      • Can the issue affect the business in another way, such as company image?
      • What is the monetary cost of the issue per year in lost revenue or increased costs?
   2. Investigate the issues and struggles that were detected to understand root causes and possible resolutions. Pass this information and session replays to the relevant department to help them resolve the problem.
   3. Build reports and dashboards and share the data with key stakeholders.
5. Get alerts via the Alert manager to make sure you always know about the latest data coming in. You can get alerts for events and thresholds and you can set times and alert types.

Analyst workflow

As an analyst, a lot of your work involves visitor sessions. You can search for sessions to view them in the timeline or to replay them. This allows you to see where visitors are struggling with your website or mobile app. You can then create reports and share that data to resolve problems that visitors experience.

1. Search for visitor sessions.
   1. Identify search criteria.
   2. Identify search conditions.
   3. Search, display, and filter. Use advanced filtering to search, for example, by text string, graphical interface, and time thresholds.
   4. If necessary, refine the search.
2. Use session search to locate a session or segment data in the report builder. Then, drill down by double-clicking any visitor session. In the session timeline, analyze a visitor’s journey to view a snapshot of the visitor session.
   • Quickly troubleshoot without having to replay sessions.
   • Locate data for events and objects. Use JSON data to create objects for reports.
   • View the events that fired for each screen view.
   • Access replay for a specific user’s session.
3. Use session search to locate a session or segment data in the report builder. Then, select the replay icon for a particular user session. Or select the replay icon when drilling down in session timeline. Replay sessions to find elements that inhibit conversion.
   • Replay the customer experience from the user’s perspective and device.
   • Identify web components that interfere with usability.
   • Understand struggle from a user’s perspective.
   • Examine the payload data for a session.

   Note: JSON data includes messages that contain user actions or session data and are available for step attributes and events.

4. Build reports to analyze customer experience issues. You can create reports by using either widget on the dashboard or the Report Builder. Start with the starter dashboard. Then, add reports to dashboards to answer questions such as:
   • How is the mobile app performing?
   • Where are users struggling in the app?
   • What mobile devices are used?
5. Schedule and export reports to key business stakeholders.

Work with your admin to configure e-mail alerts on events. You can create alerts based on the data that events collect when visitors browse your site.

• Alerts are triggered when threshold values are detected and are cumulative over a time interval.
• Segment data by creating alerts with dimension values; for example, visitors using the Firefox browser who dropped out of the checkout funnel.
• Assign an alert to email recipients.

For example, you don’t need to know when the HTTP500 error event occurs for the 100th time. You need to know whether it occurred 100 times within the last hour. The Alert Interval field defines this window of time.

Resolving customer problems

Incorporate Tealeaf into processes that are related to customer feedback. Assess the types of obstacles and struggles that might be affecting customers. Use Tealeaf to analyze and solve identified customer experience issues.

1. Act on customer feedback.
   • Search for sessions with reported issues.
     • Use advanced filtering and session timeline to locate the struggle.
     • Qualify the issue and replay the session to visualize the problem.
   • Quantify the size of the issue.
     • Use Search to understand how much of an impact this issue has.
     • View the Session List with different views to gain visibility into session data, such as contact details or users’ environments.
   • Create events and reports to track the issue.
2. Monitor customers.
   • Gather requirements for known issues and common errors.
   • Create events to monitor for anomalies and trends.
   • Investigate customer sessions when issues have met a given threshold.
3. Analyze system errors.
   • Implement UI Capture SDK on server error pages.
   • Capture and report on referrer URLs:
     • 404 errors indicate which pages are generating broken links.
     • 5xx errors indicate what might be sending the wrong data.
   • Capture (if possible) the name of the server in the cluster that caused the issue. Often, 404 errors are caused by delays in content propagation across the cluster or to the Content Delivery Network (CDN).
   • Verify whether there is a one-to-one linear correlation of error frequency and overall traffic. If there is not, it may indicate under-performing hardware or connectivity issues.
4. Analyze application errors.
   • Work with your application developers to get a list of error messages.
   • Build events and dashboards to track:
     • Known error pages
     • Known application error messages
     • Unexpected or unclassified error messages
5. Analyze usability issues.
   • Leverage events and reports to identify usability issues.
   • Track unwanted behaviors, such as:
     • Multiple attempts to submit a form or fill a field
     • Going back in the process to adjust inputs/selections
     • Going off the desired path (for example, to site help or an FAQ)
   • Track repeatable actions, especially from mobile devices:
     • Rotating the device several times
     • Zooming in or out at a certain point in the process
     • Clicking on an element several times
   • Use the Overstat overlays:
     • Take snapshots of pages of your website or mobile app
     • Apply overlays (heat maps, link analytics, form analytics) to the snapshot
     • Analyze the analytics generated from the overlays

Proactively monitoring your site or mobile app

Determine which site processes have significant business importance. Define site/process metrics: observe process health issues that might indicate customer experience issues. Investigate changes in observed metrics. Observe customer behavior on a regular basis.

• Start with what you know.
  • What do business and technical stakeholders think is important?
  • What do they believe are existing issues (usability, system performance)?
  • Tap into existing channels for information (Customer Service Representatives).
• Continually incorporate new findings. Add new metrics for measurement.
  • Use Search and Replay to identify possible struggle.
  • Isolate and investigate sessions from customer surveys and feedback forms.
  • Include new insights from replays.
• Segment data with dimensions.
• Quantify wherever possible.

What to monitor on your website

1. Examine the key processes for the website or application.
   • Start with business KPIs and break them down into site processes, actions, behaviors.
   • Look for site elements or processes that:
     • Generate revenue, such as buying a product, applying for a loan, or booking a flight.
     • Decrease costs, such as on-line flight check-in or self-service e-banking.
     • Engage or attract customers (new or existing), such as create an account, register for a newsletter, or comment on a product or content.
2. Define the website and process metrics.
   • Define which behaviors or actions:
     • Reflect the desired path through the process (happy path).
     • Are a good indicator of the true interest in the offer and willingness to purchase.
     • Are undesired.
     • Indicate struggle.
   • Plan what dashboards and reports are needed to analyze desired and undesired behaviors. Determine what metrics, events, and dimensions are needed.
   • Design hit attributes, events, session attributes, and dimensions to generate a relevant report.
3. Define the "happy path", which is the optimal path through the process to the goal.
   • Use events to track different paths and sequences of actions. There are often multiple paths to convert.
   • Track paths that are independent of sideways navigation.
   • Look for pops and drops in happy path use.
   • Find other popular paths by excluding known happy paths.
   • Identify actions that indicate the willingness to purchase, such as completed a majority of a form.
4. Look for anomalies, or actions in the process that deviate from the happy path:
   • Top exit pages or steps before the end of the process
   • Errors, especially repeated
   • Multiple attempts to pass through a step or process
   • Anomalies in the time and number of steps to complete the process. (Too quick can indicate bots.)
   • Long dwell times on pages or form fields
   • Cycling through the process (going back through steps)
   • Where do people go after abandoning (help, FAQ, support)?
5. Track abandonment, working backward.
   • Track process completion attempt abandonment, such as clicked Confirm or Order but did not succeed.
   • Identify why the attempt to convert did not work. Segment the abandonments by issue, such as:
     • Declined credit card
     • Server generation time too long
     • Application errors
     • System errors
     • Moved back a step (review a summary page and did not confirm)
   • Identify how users are abandoning mid-process:
     • Moving back to product pages
     • Contact us or FAQ pages
     • Errors mid-process then abandon
   • Use UI Capture Tracking:
     • Last Form Field Data Entered
     • Last Form Field Clicked
     • Number of time the field value was changed
     • Dwell Times of form fields when abandoned
     • Field validation error message
   One form field may be the main cause of struggle. Possible improvements include:
   • Rework form field description.
   • Move form field to a different spot.
   • Split/merge the field for more granular input (separate country, area code, phone number).
   • Remove field from the form. For example, ask the question later in the process.
6. Identify data segmentation (dimensions).
   • Find sessions that matter (for replay).
   • Find common denominators among affected users.
   Some useful segmentation types:
   • Technical delivery (browser, OS)
   • Process flows/abandonment (process name)
   • Internal search keywords/failed searches
   • Internal marketing
   • Visitor acquisition source (campaign, keywords)
   • 3rd party tools/site tools (affiliates/referrals)
   • Landing pages (first page of the session)
   • Customer profile/loyalty
   • Customer’s selected language version
   • Country/city in the address
   • Time or day parting
7. Build reports.
   • Work top-down:
     1. Define what metrics should be in the report.
     2. What kind of segmentation (filtering) would be useful?
     3. Which events, dimensions, session attributes are necessary?
   • Plan what events are needed:
     • How will the event be used?
     • What does it have to do?
     • Does it require other events (building blocks)?
     • Under what conditions should it fire?
     • What data should it collect?
     • How should this data be recorded?
     • What should be recorded in the base event?
     • What should be recorded in dimensions?
     • Where is that information available in the session?

Advanced ways for using Tealeaf

For more advanced use of Tealeaf, make Tealeaf data available to other processes and teams within your organization.

After you've mastered the basics of getting started, take the next steps.

1. Investigate reported problems. Monitor known (typical) issues. Analyze the scale of impact. Determine which customers are affected.
2. Investigate under-performing processes. Identify and remove unknown issues and struggle. Analyze why users are abandoning processes.
3. Incorporate Tealeaf into other business processes. Integrate Tealeaf data into other tools, such as marketing, call-center, and web analytics. Turn your analysis into customer retention initiatives.

Then, you can also use Tealeaf to reach even more areas of your website to get more data.

1. Extend the use of Tealeaf within your organization by using multivariate testing, dispute resolution, and fraud investigation.
2. Integrate Tealeaf into your other business processes and functions, such as web analytics, marketing, and CRM.
3. Use analysis to support customer retention initiatives.
   • Understand why customers struggle and reach out to them.
   • Design programs that recover lost orders and improve customer retention.
4. Create segments for use in Acoustic Digital Analytics.
5. Export data from the session search. Use views to include data from:
   • User environment
   • User inputs
   • Performance
   • Events and session attributes
6. Export data from Tealeaf reports.