To view customer sessions to see how they navigate the site. We align this with OpinionLab feedback to couch the comments. We also use it to verify releases as our site is personalized--it differs based on your profile.
Pros
Enables you to see the exact path and UI that the customer has taken.
Cons
More attributes to filter by.
Likelihood to Recommend
Every website should have a program like Tealeaf. Aggregate data and click stream data is valuable but Tealeaf personifies your customer's experience.
Tealeaf provides a unique view into a website beyond what typical web analytics can provide.
It captures all of a website's traffic, no need to tag pages or decide ahead of time what data you want to capture.
Data is captured and processed in real-time which reveal unknown issues as they are happening.
Replay session to see what a customer or user actually did and not just they remember doing when a problem occured.
Cons
Data is passively captured and is quick to implement because there is no need to change an app, which is great. Client side interactions also can be captured, but takes extra time because of integration into a site. There could be improvements made there.
It can be hard to start making sense of the data because of the large volume of data it captures.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tealeaf is a must for any site that has a key business process that drives revenue for a company. It is not limited to only capturing a small percentage of visitors to your site, it captures every visitor to your site.
A lot has changed to the last year for Tealeaf for the good. There are many more options to for capturing data including a cloud and SaaS offering. Take a look again if you haven't seen it in a while.
Speed of searching for web sessions and users. This particular feature seems to impress me the most. When researching incidents where users report to have difficulty on our site, all we need is any of the unique identifiers of a user (email address used, IP address, user id) and we can locate their session(s) almost immediately in TeaLeaf.
Multiple conditional events - I really like how we can have events contain already existing events. This helps a great deal if issues being researched become even more complex.
Cons
The Event Manager can be confusing to use if you aren't in it every day. It takes a few iterations of creating a more complex event for you to be able to get it right.
Graphs of transactions/URL hits by hour can be misinterpreted if being shared with others outside of the area. If you run a report or view a graph from early in the hour it may be interpreted as a significant drop in requests.
Likelihood to Recommend
Take a formal training class before diving in. It will benefit you greatly. I would suggest starting with an intermediate class if they have even a small understanding of the product beforehand.
Tealeaf is exceptionally useful for troubleshooting technical issues and investigating conversion problems. It gives you the ability to look at individual sessions, so that you can see exactly what steps the customer has taken to cause the problem. This way you can recreate errors, or determine if the layout of the site is confusing the customer and preventing sales.
Tealeaf allows you to create alerts to track specific problems. For example you can set an alert if the error handler on the site fires more than 5 times in 15 minutes, or if the completion rate of a specific process drops below a certain percentile. This lets your production support group get a jump on problems and gives them a chance to start working on a solution before the business users or the site help desk have reported the issue.
Tealeaf allows you to create reports and dashboards to track activities on your site. You can set these up to monitor sales, sign-ups, errors, traffic load, just about anything. You can arrange to have these reports sent by e-mail, so business users can be kept up to date on the status of the web site.
There are scorecards in Tealeaf that allow you to create reports to track a series of events. This let you see where people are falling out of a process so you can determine where customers are struggling and improve the customer experience.
It's possible to shadow-browse a customer's web session, allowing a help desk analyst to provide better customer service by seeing what the customer is seeing and following along with their session.
Cons
IBM is still working out a solution for seeing Mobile App traffic in Tealeaf. What they have now allows you to see the response and request, but it doesn't show where the customer is actually clicking. They've promised that newer versions will be better with this.
Tealeaf is pushing a web based viewer, trying to make this the standard over the more robust and extremely useful desktop based Tealeaf Viewer. the Web Based viewer is slow and clunky and just not as flexible, but IBM insists on pushing customers towards it. Last I heard, they plan for their mobile solution to only work in the web based viewer.
Recently IBM moved all the support documentation for Tealeaf to the IBM Support portal instead of Tealeaf.com where it has been for years. This completely broke the in application Tealeaf Help. At the time of my last use of Tealeaf near the end of November 2013, when you tried to search help from the Tealeaf web portal, you were sent to the IBM support site, and once you logged in, the search request was lost and you had to start the search again. The search of the help files is also nowhere near as good as the original tealeaf.com help site. Also, if your users tried to use help, they were out of luck because only the Tealeaf Admins have access to the IBM support portal. At first they insisted that they were not going to fix this for older versions of the software, but instead only release a fix when the next version of Tealeaf was release. There was a large discussion about this on the LinkedIn forum and IBM has said they're working on a solution, but I'm not sure when/if that will get release.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have a commerce web site, you want this product. It can be used by many different sections of the company. Product Managers can use it to see how many customers are looking at different products. Executives can use it to get reports on traffic and sales. The fraud department can use it to assist in litigation. The help desk can use it to assist customer. The Production Support group can use it to track problems and troubleshoot solutions, and developers can use it to see if customers are using their pages as the programmers expected, and use that insight to make the site better. All in all, while it's usually a pretty expensive solution, I believe in most cases it is worth the price.
Reporting needs improvement. Raw data is easy to extract but tough to analyze within the tool.
Not a very user friendly tool. Users must have some knowledge before trying create events.
Likelihood to Recommend
Depending on the size of your site and the scope of how you wish to implement Tealeaf, be sure to understand how much data you are going to be collecting. Also, you will want to fully understand how Tealeaf will be implemented in your system and whether it will be through VM or a box you already own.
