IBM Tealeaf review
December 13, 2013

IBM Tealeaf review

Sherri Kidner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

8.3

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Tealeaf has contributed signifigantly to our ROI, allowing us to detect problems quickly and find areas of customer struggle.
  • We've used Tealeaf to look at sessions where customers have complained to see what their problem was and how we could resolve it for them.
  • In my previous job at an insurance company, we were able to use Tealeaf sessions to prevent fraud by proving exactly when a policy was entered and what information was provided when policies were purchased.
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.

Using IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics

The only reason I"m not using it now is due to some transitions our company is going through. It's an extremely useful product and I hope to start using it again within the next year.