Improve Your Customers' Online Experience

Since 1998, Art.com has been an online retailer of posters, prints, and framed art. The retailer's virtual gallery of more than 1 million items includes art reproductions, decorative prints, and specialty posters. The company operates three brands: Art.com, AllPosters.com, and ArtistRising.com. Although Art.com had been using a traditional Web analytics package, the retailer found it had limited visibility into the site's obstacles, which were adversely affecting the customer experience.

Art.com prides itself on its commitment to the user experience — how people find the site and how they use it. The retailer's commitment to the user experience was suffering, as Art.com had limited visibility into site problems, such as site errors. "We were unable to determine the reason for site errors, like the 500 error," says Sid Ananthakrishnan, senior user interface designer at Art.com. "The 500 error is a common error on the Web. When your server fails to deliver a page, you see a 500 error on your screen. Yet, it was difficult and time-consuming for us to quantify the error, because we had no idea how many people were seeing that page. Our tracking mechanism wasn't robust enough to measure something like that."

Chronicle Your Customer's Online Session
In addition to determining site errors, the retailer wanted to monitor the checkout process. For example, users sometimes start the checkout process multiple times. The Web analytics software determined that the process was started multiple times, but it didn't explain why. The user may have actually started the process multiple times on purpose, or they may have received a site error in the checkout process multiple times. Yet, the existing Web analytics tool did not allow the retailer to replay exactly what each customer did while on the site.

Replaying customer sessions is important to an online retailer, because it quells the notion that users take certain paths while browsing. From a user experience standpoint, it's important for Art.com to see how long people spend on the site. The retailer can also then determine what links are the most popular.

Customize Your Customer Experience Management Portal
Ananthakrishnan planned to replace Art.com's existing Web analytics tool. In September 2006, after testing several products, the retailer chose CX Impact from Tealeaf, an online customer experience management tool. Tealeaf was chosen because it allows the retailer to replay and store sessions. "Since every platform is different, Tealeaf worked with us to customize our platform," says Ananthakrishnan. Tealeaf representatives spent five days at Art.com headquarters installing the solution on the retailer's servers. During that time, the vendor trained Art.com on the system. CX Impact users have the solution on their desktop, and they are given a user name and password for logon. The CX Impact portal also has a dashboard that offers a 30,000-foot view of website performance. Users may also customize their dashboard to show things such as speed, sessions, conversions, page counts, etc. Users also receive email alerts when problems on the site occur. The IT team addresses the issues based on severity.

Ananthakrishnan deems this installation a success, as the retailer now has real-time tracking of customer sessions. "It enables us to be more efficient," says Ananthakrishnan. "Whatever we want to do — set, track, or control — we can do it ourselves without IT intervention." Since the implementation, Art.com has dramatically reduced the time spent diagnosing and fixing the problems causing failed customer experiences.

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