By Chris Bucholtz

Tracking customer experience on websites can be tricky, mostly because the way customers are tracked is often not linked to real behavior. As a result, the numbers can be discouraging and confusing. For example, if you’re running an ecommerce site, you may think non-selling information features and fun pages are useless because customers don’t always end clicking through to the checkout page with merchandise. If you’re an airline, you might assume something’s amiss with your customers’ experience because many enter, look at a few flights on a few dates, and then leave.

The reality can be very different. Those “frivolous” features may reinforce a brand image and result in return sales over time. Those airline shoppers who keep dropping off may be looking to book a long, complicated – and lucrative – overseas trip.

These metrics-defying scenarios are probably the rule and not the exception. That’s what makes the new analytic tools from TeaLeaf, cxResults, so neat. The product allows the customer experience to be tracked in terms of visits, not simply by clicks, so companies can develop realistic views of customer behavior instead of the skewed views they’ve had in the past.

In addition to spotting the normal things – spots where problems with interfaces or systems cause large numbers of customers to bail out of the site, for instance – it will enable ecommerce businesses to finally see what they’re doing right, as well. For that reason alone, companies ought to be happy this concept has reached the market.

From a CRM perspective, it’ll bring a new ability to study the actual relationships they have with customers, since the patterns under examination by the Tealeaf solution are far broader and deeper than whether someone ended the visit with a transaction. I suspect that, as Web 2.0 ways of dealing with customers come to the fore, these kinds of analytics will be increasingly important for companies to develop realistic views of their own successes and failures.