IBM has announced plans to acquire Tealeaf Technology, Inc., a provider of customer experience analytics software that helps organizations react more quickly to consumer trends. With this agreement, IBM says it will support its Smarter Commerce initiative with the acquisition of qualitative analytics capabilities that provide CMOs, e-commerce, and customer service professionals with real-time and automated insights into customer buying experiences across online and mobile devices.
These capabilities will help marketing and customer service professionals by improving customer support, site usability, marketing campaigns, and online conversion rates. Tealeaf will enable IBM to provide companies with qualitative web and digital analytics capabilities, allowing them to capture and replay a customer's web and mobile interactions to provide a more granular and richer view of a customer's experience.
According to IBM, the need to deliver a seamless mobile experience has become increasingly critical to organizations as global online commerce expected to hit $1 trillion by 2014 and mobile commerce $200 billion by 2015. These organizations, IBM says, are struggling to meet the demands created by the shifting buying patterns of their customers, who increasingly turn to online, social and mobile channels to gather information, make purchases and receive services.
Tealeaf provides a full suite of customer experience management software, which records and analyzes a customer's website and mobile interactions. As a result, marketers can spot patterns and address issues in website and mobile application design and provide a more streamlined online customer experience that leads to improved revenue, customer satisfaction, customer service productivity, and profitability.
"With these new capabilities from Tealeaf, we can not only provide chief marketing officers and other marketing leaders the qualitative insights into how customers actually experience their brands, but show them how to react in real time across marketing, sales and service," says Craig Hayman, general manager of Industry Solutions at IBM.
Financial details for the acquisition, which is expected to close in the second quarter of 2012, were not disclosed.
More information on Smarter Commerce can be found at www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_commerce/overview/.