Acoustic Tealeaf (formerly Acoustic Experience Analytics and before that IBM Tealeaf; Acoustic has restored the former branding), is an AI powered application providing site visitor session recording and replay, anomaly detection, and struggle analytics.
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.
There are no special resources needed to use Clicky - it works well for all the sites I've used it on, providing up to date metrics on visitors and actions. It started out as analytics particularly suited to bloggers and it's still very strong there, but I believe it can work in a wide range of scenarios.
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.
It's hard to find a negative feature about Clicky, but if I must pick one, it would be the fact that some reports are only available for limited periods, which means you can't get a one year overview of all aspects of your site. That's just nitpicking, though, as what Clicky offers is more than enough for most people.
Tealeaf is a highly demanding tool that can report just about any KPI one can think of. The reward can be great if one is willing to put the time and effort into building a comprehensive and organized event structure.
In addition to the factors already mentioned, Clicky is constantly being updated to improve functionality for users and the development team is extremely responsive. Recent updates include enhanced support for HTML5 audio and video tracking, additional visitor detail and new comparison trends. In my opinion, Clicky just keeps getting better
Provides context to developers - As with pretty much any programmer, they need context of user activity leading up to a problem in order for them to debug code. TeaLeaf does a great job of doing that. We can identify a problem in the code, search for a TeaLeaf (and Java application session) that has the problem in it and show the developers what the user was doing when the problem happened. This greatly speeds up the time to resolution.
Over the 7 years I've used it, Clicky has given me a better understanding of where my main visitors are coming from, contributing for example to a decision to create content in US English rather than my native UK English because most visitors are from the US.
Clicky provided real time stats when few others were doing so, enabling me to respond more quickly to visitors interacting with my content.
