Reducing Customer Struggle 2011

There is a newer version of this report available: Reducing Customer Struggle 2012

The Reducing Customer Struggle report, published by Econsultancy in association with Tealeaf, looks in-depth at the extent to which companies understand the overall online customer experience and the approaches or types of technology they use to identify issues and remedy them. The study also looks at which customer channels are most relevant for organizations and the relationship between online and offline business teams.

The 64-page report, also summarised in presentation format, is based on an online survey of almost 500 business professionals working for companies involved in e-commerce and e-business and includes the following sections:

• Understanding the online customer experience
• Problems or issues with the online experience
• Use of customer channels
• Integrating online with offline channels

Key findings include:

• Poor online user experience, coupled with a lack of insight about why customers are abandoning websites, is costing businesses billions of dollars / pounds - more than $50 billion lost in the US and around £14 billion lost in the UK in the last year.
• Organisations have least understanding about what is happening at the bottom of the online sales funnel - over three-quarters of companies have 'limited' or 'no understanding' about why customers abandon the shopping cart (78%) or leave the site without converting (81%).
• Companies are prioritising investment in online channels but de-prioritising investment in the online customer experience: almost half of organisations cite lack of budget as one of the three most significant barriers to gaining a better understanding of the online customer experience.
• Many organisations fail to adopt a multichannel approach and share insights across all business functions, as only 3% of respondents describe the multichannel experience they provide as 'excellent'.

Table of contents

1. Executive Summary and Highlights
   1. About Econsultancy
   2. About Tealeaf
2. Introduction by Tealeaf
3. Methodology and Sample
   1. Methodology
   2. Respondent profiles
      1. Business objectives
4. Findings
   1. Understanding the online customer experience
      1. Responsibility for online customer experience
      2. Understanding types of customer behaviour
      3. Understanding the overall online customer experience
      4. Methods used for understanding the customer experience
      5. Effectiveness of different methods
      6. Barriers to understanding the online customer experience
   2. Problems or issues with the online experience
      1. Discovering issues with the online experience
      2. Effectiveness of different approaches to identifying problems
      3. Most common and most serious website issues
      4. Approach to social media comments about customer experience issues
      5. Quantifying lost revenue
      6. Prioritising problems and issues customers face online
      7. Business initiatives to improve customer experience quality
   3. Use of customer channels
      1. Customer channels used for sales and service
      2. Change in investment in customer channels
      3. Quality of customer experience for different channels
      4. Customer service as a sales channel
   4. Integrating online with offline channels
      1. Visibility into online customer activity
      2. Visibility into offline customer activity
      3. Rating of multichannel customer experience
      4. Relationship between online teams and call centres
      5. Amount of calls resulting from a poor online customer experience
      6. Measurement of problem resolution
      7. Ability to escalate website problems
      8. Access to information about individual online experiences
5. Appendix: Respondent Profiles
   1. Business sector
   2. Business focus
   3. Geography
   4. Size of company by revenue
   5. Size of company by number of employees

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