Travel Merchants Improve Digital Travel Experiences by Adopting Customer Experience Management Solutions
More than Twenty Travel Brands Using Tealeaf to Meet Soaring Online Consumer Expectations and Derive eBusiness Insights
San Francisco, CA, September 11, 2007 - Tealeaf®, a leader in online Customer Experience Management (CEM), today announced a surge of customer wins in the travel industry, indicating a growing strategic emphasis on improving customer experiences within the expanding digital travel market. More than twenty travel providers and portals — such as Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), Aloha Airlines, Bourne Leisure, Continental Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, Holidaybreak, hotels.com, Starwood, TUI Worldwide and VEGAS.com — are among the companies leveraging Tealeaf's Customer Experience Management solutions to proactively identify, understand and eliminate online obstacles and ensure successful customer experiences.
According to an August 2007 report, "Humanizing the Digital Travel Experience," by Forrester Research, an independent research firm, 2007 online leisure travel sales in the US and Europe are expected to reach $142.2 billion and grow to $213.8 billion by 2010. The independent report added, "And yet, despite travel's business success to date, travelers' satisfaction with most digital channels is, for the most part, tangibly inferior to using offline channels. Why? Travel companies don't understand four key areas that travelers view as important: customer service, personalization, seamless cross-channel experiences, and institutive site design and navigation. Worse, because they don't understand the importance travelers place in these areas, travel companies further handicap their digital channels — and therefore themselves — by not meeting customer expectations. The result? A series of noticeable performance gaps, which are the difference between the importance travelers place on various tasks related to the digital travel experience, and the industry's success in meeting these travelers' expectations."
"Tealeaf provides us with unparalleled insight into each customer's online experience," said John Keast, COO, VEGAS.com. "We are able to immediately gain visibility into any online issues, improve the overall usability and conversion of our websites, and make business decisions influenced directly by the customer point of view."
Consumers are rapidly adopting online travel. In fact, "travelers who use the Internet — for any purpose — are the norm," with 90 percent of American business travelers regularly going online and 83 percent of US leisure travelers going online at least once a month according to the Forrester report. Beyond that, "two-thirds or more of all travelers in North America view technology as something that helps make their lives easier — a benefit that extends to travel planning and purchase." Yet, digital travel experiences still often fall short of meeting online consumers' expectations, with the report stating that more than 199 million travelers are frustrated getting travel information online, for reasons including poor website navigation and lack of essential functionality.
"With the online travel market growing at such a rapid pace, this is a very positive time for the market but it is more important than ever that companies recognize obstacles to their customers' online success still exist, and are potentially very detrimental to their top line," said Rebecca Ward, chairman & CEO, Tealeaf. "Our travel customers are not simply resting on general market momentum, they are truly committed to proactively delivering the best possible online user experience. We are proud to be a part of their business strategy by providing actionable insight into the dynamic online interactions of each user on their sites."
Tealeaf was recently recognized as "an industry pioneer" and named "the unchallenged leader in customer behavior analysis" by Forrester in "The Forrester Wave: Appliance-Based End-User Experience Monitoring," Q2 2007 (June 2007).
With Tealeaf, businesses are empowered to see how their website works through the eyes of the customer, instead of relying on the insufficiency of disparate data points in effort to interpret their experiences.
About Tealeaf
Tealeaf is the leading provider of online customer experience management solutions. Tealeaf's CX family of solutions provides unprecedented enterprise-wide visibility into every user's unique online interactions. This "360-degree view" of the online customer experience enables a clear and consistent understanding of the customer for Ebusiness, IT, customer service and legal and compliance executives and their organizations across a wide range of vertical industries including retail, banking, travel, insurance, telecommunications, pharmaceutical and transportation. Founded in 1999, Tealeaf is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and is privately-held. For more information, visit www.tealeaf.com.
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© Copyright 2007 Tealeaf Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Tealeaf products and services mentioned herein are the registered or unregistered trademarks and service marks of Tealeaf Technology, Inc. All other trademarks or service marks are the property of their respective holders and are hereby acknowledged.
Press Contact:
Horn Group: Mandy Kakavas
415.905.4015
mandy.kakavas@horngroup.com
