Tealeaf helps the online leader in discount travel improve its online customer experience by providing access to behavior-based insights drawn from actual user activity.

1. Priceline.com:
The online leader in discount travel
Priceline.com’s dynamic travel web site service hosts over 11 million
unique visitors per month¹. Tealeaf helps Priceline.com improve its
online customer experience by providing access to behavior-based
insights drawn from actual user activity.
The battle for customer loyalty continues to be fought tooth and
nail by online travel companies. As web consumers become
increasingly cost-conscious and shrewdly willing to shop around, CUSTOMER PROFILE
providing a better online customer experience has become a key
The Priceline Group of Companies is a leader
differentiator for many travel companies. Priceline.com recognized in global online hotel reservations, with
these consumer trends early on and developed an approach to approximately 61,000,000 room nights booked
in 2009. The Group is composed of four primary
provide an incrementally better website experience, keep customers brands—Booking.com, Priceline.com, Agoda.com
coming back and drive online revenue. and TravelJigsaw. The Priceline Group provides
online travel services in 38 languages in 100
countries in Europe, North America, Asia, the
Despite previous investments in other web site optimization tools, Middle East and Africa.
Priceline.com deployed Tealeaf for its ability to provide real-time
context for complex customer behavior on an enterprise-class scale.
Priceline.com hosts an average of more than 11 million unique RETURN ON INVESTMENT
visitors per month¹ and provides those visitors with up-to-the-
> > >
minute information on hundreds of thousands of flight itineraries, Tealeaf identifies a Real-time visibility Tealeaf helps Priceline
hotels, rental cars, vacation packages and cruises. This high volume previously unknown allowed Priceline to improve their
site issue that enables resolve a flight reporting and analysis
of traffic and robust product inventory makes for an extremely
a more convenient availability problem. for customer and
complex business to monitor and optimize. search experience. robot traffic.
CHALLENGES
Historically, Priceline.com’s customer traffic data was dispersed
across the enterprise and processed nightly. Multiple data sources
housed various pieces of customer traffic data and this meant that With Tealeaf, Priceline.com is able to respond to customer issues
there was no central solution to tie-together all of the critical more quickly and be more proactive in their site optimization
components of the online customer experience. Priceline.com’s approach. The company has experienced significant improvements
prior optimization approach of analyzing web logs and using in customer conversion and retention via its use of Tealeaf across
in-house log parsers only helped with after-the-fact analysis. the enterprise.
Unfortunately, this post facto information failed to deliver the real-
time insights that the company needed to significantly improve
customer conversion and drive deeper customer loyalty.
A BETTER APPROACH
To address these challenges, Priceline turned to Tealeaf for an online
customer experience management (CEM) solution that enabled the
company to receive the reporting capabilities of a web analytics
solution and also provide the ability to drill-down and gain
qualitative insights into its customers’ experiences on Priceline.com.
Tealeaf’s unique replay ability, a page-by-page, browser-level
recording of the actual customer experience, enables Priceline.com
to make more effective site optimization decisions based on actual
customer behavior and outcomes. ¹ According to Compete® 2010 statistics �
tealeaf | priceline.com www.tealeaf.com

2. Priceline.com Visibility.
Insight.
Answers.
Tealeaf helps us “see” what our customers see when they
use our online services. This allows us to correct site,
design and system issues in a timely manner.
Michael Diliberto | CIO North America, Priceline.com
WIN 1 – TEALEAF IDENTIFIES A PREVIOUSLY UNNOTICED ISSUE, WIN 3 – TEALEAF HELPS PRICELINE DISTINGUISH
CREATING A MORE CONVENIENT SEARCHING EXPERIENCE CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR FROM ROBOT TRAFFIC, IMPROVING
Problem THE ACCURACY OF REPORTING AND ANALYSIS
Priceline saves a customer’s previous trip searches (departure and Problem
arrival airports and dates) for quick access on return visits to its home Most transactional web sites are open-access platforms. Simply
page. The company’s software allows for a 500-millisecond delay for put, if you have a browser, you can use the web site. This is good
previous searches to populate once the home page is accessed. Last for customers but unfortunately, it is also good for machines, or
fall, during a server expansion, one of the servers was not able to rather the people developing web site crawlers, commonly known
return the saved-search data fast enough, causing the home page to as spiders, or robot traffic. The Priceline.com web site contains
render without this feature being populated. a significant amount of valuable content, like hotel images, prices,
descriptions and reviews. Recognizing customer behavior patterns
Solution is hard enough without a small number of hyperactive IPs skewing
Since “saved search” was an optional service, it did not throw a hard average session lengths and page request counts. However,
error, just a warning that was not received in large enough volume to separating customer data from robot traffic is not always a
be noticed. Tealeaf highlighted the problem by tracking the events in simple task.
both usage and display counts.
Solution
Benefit Priceline uses Tealeaf to feed specific events into a complex event
Through visibility provided by Tealeaf, Priceline was able to correct processing engine that scores the traffic and enables Priceline to
the problem and provide customers once again with quick access to distinguish customers from robots. This approach also enables
saved search data and a more convenient online experience. Priceline to store the data for enhanced reporting and analysis.
WIN 2 – REAL-TIME VISIBILITY HELPS PRICELINE RESOLVE Benefit
A FLIGHT AVAILABILITY PROBLEM Priceline is now able to effectively monitor customer behavior
Problem without the effects of spiders or other robots affecting their analysis.
Priceline.com relies on data provided by its suppliers in real-time. On This enables the company to make better site optimization decisions
occasion, some of this data is not available when requested. Quickly and improve the online customer experience.
identifying what is missing and exactly when the errors started is very
helpful in identifying the root cause of the problem. During one early ABOUT TEALEAF TECHNOLOGY
morning over the summer, an unusual increase in “no flights available” Tealeaf provides online customer experience management solutions
errors for Priceline’s airline customers was observed. and is the unchallenged leader in customer behavior analysis.
Tealeaf’s CEM solutions include both a customer behavior analysis
Solution suite and customer service optimization suite. For organizations that
Tealeaf helps Priceline identify common elements of site issues in are making customer experience a top priority, these solutions
real-time. Based on data gathered from thousands of customer provide unprecedented enterprise-wide visibility into every visitor’s
sessions, Tealeaf enables Priceline to efficiently resolve unforeseen unique online interactions for ongoing analysis and web site
issues. In this case, the common event was a set of flight destinations optimization. Online executive stakeholders from ebusiness and IT
that were improperly loaded by the supplier. Once the supplier was to customer service and compliance are leveraging Tealeaf to build
made aware of the details of the issue, they were able to quickly fix a customer experience management competency across the
the data feed. organization. Founded in 1999, Tealeaf is headquartered in San
Francisco, California, and is privately held. For more information,
Benefit visit www.tealeaf.com.
Through detailed Tealeaf customer session analysis, Priceline was able
to determine that the problem was limited to a specific subset of
destinations. The problem was subsequently traced back to the
supplier so they could promptly fix the issue.
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