Navigating to Customer Success
Continued
Proactive Customer Experience Management
If customers complain about something, a company has a chance of fixing the problem. But that doesn’t always happen. Not all customers who experience problems follow up by complaining—instead, some leave and never come back. Also, some problems can be transient, occurring sporadically for a few hours and then correcting themselves.
But at TomTom that no longer happens. “With insights from Oracle Real User Experience Insight, we now get notified within a couple of minutes when something goes wrong—if no new orders are coming in or if the end-to-end processes aren’t working normally,” say Diele. “It also helps us in outage situations, because we can pinpoint the IT problems and react more quickly—getting a fix up sooner, which helps our customers first and foremost. That helps us both lose less money as well as make more money.”
And it’s this type of impact that transformative IT departments are having on businesses of all types. “When IT leaves the back office to become part of the business, the quality of IT services must be in line with business expectations,” says Forrester’s Garbani. “For example, the quality of the user experience is what makes the business experience pleasant or not. It is also part of user satisfaction and client retention, which is extremely important to the business.”
Oracle Real User Experience Insight also helps TomTom’s IT group identify the weak spots—for instance, Web pages that might have long load times and are causing customer frustration and customer drop-offs.
“If you know which Web pages are causing the problems, you can fix them,” notes Diele. “You can improve the overall user experience, and as a result, conversion rates will go up and your customers will be happier. That all translates into money.”
Oracle Real User Experience Insight monitors not just TomTom’s Web site but also the core shopping engine, payment flow, payment service providers, Web servers, and overall performance. In short, it monitors everything that occurs on TomTom’s e-commerce site. The product does real-time monitoring of all the elements and notifies the appropriate people when there are metrics that are above or below certain thresholds. It also generates daily and weekly reports on the service levels and performance of the entire end-to-end user experience.
“The monitoring, notification, and reporting are what really make this product very valuable to our business,” says Diele. “Using Oracle Real User Experience Insight, we have good insights into the average response times. Often our reports show exactly how many people drop off when load times become too long. That helps us to identify where in our infrastructure and where in the software we need to put more focus, and which people need to be responsible for optimizing those parts.”
Another important aspect of the system is that it now lets TomTom business leaders such as Diele actually set service levels that can be measured, monitored, and reported on, providing another way for TomTom to align business and IT.
“Before, we never measured anything on the Web in much detail. Now we can set service levels, and we can set targets to improve,” says Diele. “And because we’re notified every time something goes wrong, we can fix it and make sure it doesn’t go wrong in the future. As a result of using Oracle Real User Experience Insight, the overall service levels and overall customer experience have improved dramatically.”
Providing a Framework for Motivation
IT shouldn’t happen in a vacuum. Instead, a well-run IT group is integrally linked with the business and its changing objectives. Yet sometimes it can be hard for organizations to build those linkages.
“When I joined the company, there were not a lot of people outside of the e-commerce business unit who were really worried or concerned with the Web site or systems on a daily basis. They simply weren’t aware of the relative poor performance of the systems,” says Diele. “There was a huge potential upside for improving system stability and infrastructure. Investing in Oracle products has helped the business side convince the IT department of the added value of investing resources in improving the processes and infrastructure. We were able to use Oracle Real User Experience Insight as an eye-opener to get the organization moving in the right direction.”
Oracle Real User Experience Insight is also helping the company establish better alignment between its business and IT organizations. “I think one very important value for us that’s hard to quantify is that this system provides us with reporting, and reporting is always very essential in making something come alive,” says Diele. “If you don’t have statistics, if you don’t have information, it’s hard to communicate something. Now we have the information, the reports, the data, and statistics. We can actually show people what’s happening, and as a result, it becomes alive and people are much more motivated to act on the information.”
With better visibility and metrics into its e-commerce experience, everyone at TomTom shares a similar goal for business growth. “Now, all of a sudden, people realize how fast e-commerce is growing and how important it is for our business,” says Diele. “It’s very satisfying.”
For More Information
Oracle Real User Experience Insight
New Ways of Achieving Business and IT Alignment
David A. Kelly is a freelance business/technology writer based in Massachusetts.
