How Musician’s Friend tunes up online customer experiences
When Musician’s Friend launched an online gift card program last year, it identified and fixed a problem with the card’s checkout process within the first day of the program’s launch thanks to new software that monitors the customer experience, vice president of IT D.J. Buell says. Without the monitoring system, the problem could have taken weeks to identify and repair, costing a huge lost in sales, he adds.
“If we have a recurring problem after launching a new program, it could easily total hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue,” Buell tells InternetRetailer.com.
Musician’s Friend, the direct-to-consumer unit of musical instruments retailer Guitar Center Inc. and No. 48 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, operates MusiciansFriend.com, GuitarCenter.com and several other related sites as well as print catalogs.
Musician’s Friend frequently adds and changes online shopping features, and in recent has years has launched new web site brands. The strategy has resulted in steady growth in sales. But until Musician’s Friend installed the Tealeaf CX session-monitoring software from Tealeaf Technology Inc. last year, it was at a loss in its ability to assure that new sites and shopping features were offering the intended shopping experience, Buell says.
“We would just launch new programs and hope for the best, and we wouldn’t know about problems with the customer experience until we heard from customers through our contact center,” Buell says.
“We would have occasional problems, but we wouldn’t know about them right away, and when we did learn about them, we didn’t have enough details about the problem to work on them immediately,” Buell adds. “So it was a double whammy—it took a long time to learn about problems and a long time to fix them.”
The Tealeaf application provides automated alerts to handheld devices as well as through e-mail to Buell and other Musician’s Friend personnel whenever customers experience web site problems. The retailer also can set business rules to receive alerts when, for example, the number of clicks on an add-to-cart button drops to a certain number per hour.
The system also enables the retailer to take immediate action to find the source of a problem when a customer calls to complain about a site malfunction, Buell says. If a customer who has registered online with an e-mail address calls the contact center with a problem, Musician’s Friend can log onto a Tealeaf CX web portal to replay that customer’s actual shopping session to identify any error messages or particular navigation issues. If an unregistered customer calls and identifies a problem as, say, a 404 error message, Musician’s Friend can replay similar sessions to identify what’s causing the errors.
In one case where a shopper complained of a slow shopping cart, Musician’s Friend discovered that the customer had placed about 200 items in his shopping cart. It also discovered that the web site was doing a lot of unnecessary database processing for each carted item. “We reworked the database connections, so now customers can put a lot of items in a cart without slowing down,” Buell says.
Buell says Musician’s Friend expects to easily recoup the cost of the CX software. “With the amount of volume we’re doing, all it would take are two major problems in a year to pay for the software license,” he says.
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