Capturing User Sessions Helps Improve Online customer experience

COMPANY: Esurance

BUSINESS: Personal auto insurance

REVENUE: $600 million in written premiums (2006)

LOCATION: San Francisco

COMPANY SIZE: 1,600 employees

IT DIRECTOR: Marj Hutchings, director of Internet operations

PROJECT GOAL: Improve the online customer experience.

APPROACH: Implement software that shows customers' site activity to identify what visitors experience and provide information to fix errors.

PRODUCT SELECTED: Tealeaf

HOW IT WORKS: A customer will call or email our service center when they experience an error on the site. Sometimes this is an isolated incident. But with Tealeaf, we can quickly reproduce the error and see if other customers may be experiencing the same issue.

WHY THEY CHOSE IT: We evaluated a couple of different tools and chose to pilot Tealeaf. It wowed us in the pilot phase, and has ever since.

THE "WOW" FACTOR: Being able to see a "mini-movie" of a customer's Web session (from the customer's point of view) so that we can truly understand a problem and then fix it.

ROI: Less than three months.

BUSTED MYTH: We had thought that all customers use our site the same way in exactly the way we intended. But some of the things we see people doing are quite surprising, like clicking on the same button 30 times in about two seconds and wondering why everything froze up.

NEXT UP: We plan to expand the reporting functionality to open it up to some of our nontechnical associates.

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT ABOUT SECRET AGENT ERIN ESURANCE: In her spare time, Erin likes to make mashups for YouTube.

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