
IBM today proclaimed a definitive covenant to acquire Tealeaf Technology, Inc., a foremost provider of customer knowledge analytics software that helps officialdoms to gain intelligence and react more summarily to customer trends in today’s digitally altered marketplace. Financial details were not unveiled.
The attainment is subject to customary closing circumstances and regulatory consent and is expected to close in the second quarter of 2012.
With this contract, IBM extends its Smarter Commerce ingenuity by adding qualitative analytics capabilities that deliver chief marketing officers (CMOs), e-commerce and customer service mavens with real-time and mechanized insights into online customer buying involvements across online and mobile devices. As a result, establishments can gain actionable insight that permits them to improve customer support, alter site usability, tailor marketing crusades and increase online renovation rates.
The need to convey a seamless mobile capability has become progressively critical to CMOs with global online commerce estimated to hit $1 trillion by 2014 and mobile commerce $200 billion by 2015. (1)
Tealeaf has over 450 patrons worldwide including 30 of the Fortune 100 companies. These customers are primarily in financial facilities, travel, and retail and infrastructures services. Current clients include: Dell, Wells Fargo, Air Canada, GEICO, Orbitz, Crate & Barrel, Neiman Marcus, Expedia, Zappos, ING Direct, Best Buy, DirecTV, McKesson and StubHub.
Organizations today are harassed to meet the anxieties created by the rapidly shifting buying forms of their customers, who progressively turn to online, social and mobile channels to pleat information, make purchases and receive amenities. This new digital marketplace entails companies to be highly responsive to their customers’ deeds in order to both compete and grow. The occasion to better understand a customer’s involvement on websites and mobile devices grants a major competitive advantage for businesses.
Tealeaf delivers a full suite of customer capability management software, which records and examines a customer’s website and mobile interfaces. As a result, vendors can spot patterns and address concerns in website and mobile application design and provide a more efficient online customer familiarity that leads to improved revenue, customer gratification, customer service efficiency, and profitability.
For example, using Tealeaf software, the CMO of an online merchant can identify faintness in a recent mobile marketing crusade by spotting instances and replaying situations that generated customer sessions to end rashly. As a result, marketers can rally the customer’s experience by addressing usability, site design or affluence of use and reach out to consumers to recapture their interest.
In another occurrence, an online travel agency finds that when companions misspell a vacation package name and receive zero search results, nearly 100 percent of the visitors leave the site without finalizing a booking, motivation the website team to address the retort and offer other steering options. By replaying and studying each consumer’s session, the travel agent can pinpoint the issue and immediately serve those patrons and maintain their loyalty.
“Marketers must constantly deliver a better consumer capability on both the Web and mobile devices to meet the prospects of todays authorized consumers,” said Craig Hayman, General Manager of Industry Solutions at IBM. “With these new abilities from Tealeaf, we can not only deliver chief marketing officers and other marketing leaders the qualitative visions into how consumers actually experience their brands, but show them how to respond in real time across marketing, sales and service.”
“Tealeaf’s untested technology can be organized into a business’s current environment with no needed alterations so they begin capturing customer data and distributing optimal experiences instantly,” said Rebecca Ward, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Tealeaf. “IBM Smarter Commerce is the flawless fit for Tealeaf and further inaugurates IBM as the leading partner for trades looking to succeed in today’s fast sprouting environment.”
Tealeaf will extend IBM’s leadership in Smarter Commerce by giving corporations qualitative web and digital analytics competences, allowing them to capture and replay a customer’s web and mobile interfaces to provide a grittier and richer view of a customer’s involvement. This perceptive view helps marketers answer the question of “why” customers intermingle as they do and thus provide a more enhanced online customer experience leading to amended revenue, customer satisfaction, customer service efficiency and profitability.
Consistent with IBM’s Smarter Commerce approach and following the closing of the business, IBM will endure to support and enhance Tealeaf’s technologies and patrons while allowing them to take advantage of the broader IBM assortment. Tealeaf will be united into IBM’s Enterprise Marketing and Management (EMM) Group, which includes formerly acquired assets from Coremetrics, Unica and DemandTec. IBM has capitalized more than $3 billion in edifice its Smarter Commerce enterprise, a key driver of growth and productivity.
Tealeaf is grounded in San Francisco, California with additional agencies in Europe.