As #50 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide ranking of America's largest Web retailers, Musician's Friend - the online arm of Guitar Center - offers over 36,000 products in its mail order catalogs and on its website, musiciansfriend.com.
Q: Your company seems very focused on online customer experience management. Why is that?
The overall customer experience is very important to Musician’s Friend. We want to lead the industry with award-winning commitment to quality, value, and service. We still offer money-back satisfaction and price guarantees on every purchase. We take pride in having a topflight staff of customer service people who are all practicing musicians. When over half of the company’s revenue coming started coming in through the online channel, we knew we needed better information. We felt the usability of musiciansfriend.com was working, but we had no visibility into what our customers were experiencing from their perspective.
Q: How did you identify online customer issues prior to your purchase of TeaLeaf?
Before TeaLeaf, we were solely looking at how quickly pages were loading and how quickly consumers were transacting. We were trying to correlate performance data to identify why customers were abandoning transactions. We were under the impression that only slow performance was affecting customers or causing abandonment.
Q: How has that changed with your implementation of TeaLeaf?
Now we can track anything that leads to a customer transaction failure or abandonment, which is a much more realistic approach. We’ve been able to set benchmarks to measure future progress. We also now are able to use TeaLeaf as a customer service solution that enables us to see exactly what experiences our customers have gone through, when they call or email us regarding a problem or question.
Q: You're still a relatively new TeaLeaf customer. Have you seen any immediate benefits?
Based on anecdotal information we set up an event to track a specific error during our customer checkout process. Our original belief was that this error was only occurring a couple of times each day. Once TeaLeaf was installed, we identified that the error was occurring an average of 400 times per day. A simple usability redesign was able to address the problem. We’ve recovered 50% of our carts since the problem was identified.
We at TeaLeaf look forward to working with DJ and Musician's Friend while they continue to grow their online business. Below is the latest press coverage on how Musician's Friend is utilizing TeaLeaf solutions.
