Retailers and apparel manufacturers are painfully aware of the challenges associated with creating a seamless online experience for customers. In fact, according to a recent survey conducted with Harris Interactive, we found that the potential online shopping dollars impacted by transaction problems rings up at $44.7 billion. The trouble is, this is nothing new. For years, online retailers and apparel manufacturers have been tasked with figuring out new tips, tricks and technologies that will help them deliver superior experiences for their customers who shop online and ensure that the "simple" task of making their purchase is unabated.

As consumers ourselves, we can see why. How many of us have gone to an online apparel website, found the perfect sale item, and added it to our cart, only to find that we cannot complete the transaction because of a website error? Far too often these issues of customer struggle can persist for days, weeks or even months, resulting in costly losses for retail and apparel manufacturers. This affects even the best of the best because they can't see the user experience in order to fix it.

Last year Bluefly retroactively discovered that an online transaction issue that was impacting international shoppers existed for more than a year. The company tallied the potential losses resulting from this problem in the millions of dollars, and turned to customer experience management (CEM) software to promptly rectify the issue. Today, they're delivering a more seamless online experience than ever before and are able to quickly recognize and resolve problems as they arise.

Static? Hardly.
While every online apparel manufacturer and retailer likely has a story similar to Bluefly's, the important thing for companies to recognize is that the online customer experience is not static 
-- solutions to challenges that persisted years ago are not the same solutions that will fly with consumers today. One of the main reasons is that issues with online customer experiences are compounded with the advent of social technologies.

Ten years ago, for example, we might gripe to a family member or friend about not being able to complete a purchase online, and that company would suffer the loss of our shopping cart and maybe even our loyalty. But the digital footprint of that experience would stop there -- today, it's a much different story.

The rise of social networks and microblogging -- from Twitter to Facebook to Yammer -- have created an "echo chamber" effect. The new reality is that the Internet has empowered consumers to proliferate damaging customer service experiences in the masses, and in turn harm a company's brand and revenue potential. This concept is supported by the theory that word-of-mouth recommendations go a long way in shaping consumer perceptions and buying behavior, which has massive potential impact on the online channel.

Real Customer Expectations, in Real-Time
Add up the following and you get a dire equation: widespread use of social technologies creating an echo chamber effect, and the competition a mere click away. Retailers need to adopt a new tool set of CEM technology, so that they can act fast and efficiently when it comes to optimizing online stores, and retain customers in a highly competitive online environment.

What's important to emphasize here is that traditional CEM and behavior analysis technologies haven't always been available in real-time. The advancement of real-time customer experience management is a reaction to industry need; CEM technology has gotten much more sophisticated over time in order to keep up with the real-time web and fiercer online competition.

Analysts and media pundits alike have noted that the ebusiness market has matured, and rich, real-time insight is more critical than ever before. Given the challenges presented here, what's an online retailer to do? Simple. Create your own customer experience checklist and measure your own initiative against the new industry standard for what constitutes a seamless online experience today.

Your Customer Experience Checklist
First, ask yourself, are you able to measure and assess the online customer experience on your apparel site? Further, can you identify -- in real-time -- patterns of behavior that signify areas of the website where site visitors tend to struggle most?

Next, establish your own innovative warning system. What are your highest-impact customer- facing issues? What I mean by this is, when do usability issues most often occur? Do the majority of site issues happen when customers checkout at a certain time of day or with a certain online form? Be proactively on the lookout for these issues to recur again, whether or not you've been told the problem was an isolated one. This will enable your business to respond to issues customers are encountering as they occur, rather than relying on after-the-fact analysis.

Finally, are you able to "score" customer struggle, pinpoint the source and quantify the business impact? Do you have a plan in place to emphasize and hone in on the most pressing issues that impact the most customers? Focusing on minimizing sources of struggle opens the door to customer-centric change at your organization. And ultimately, it will improve the business performance of your web site.

We may not live in a perfect digital world, but that doesn't mean we can't develop plans to improve the e-commerce experience, one frustrated customer at a time. Proactively identifying potential website issues, putting a plan in place to correct those issues, and recovering lost revenue from abandoned shopping carts should be at the forefront of every apparel manufacturers to-do list.

Geoff Galat is Vice President of World Wide Marketing at Tealeaf, where he is responsible for overseeing marketing and product management. Geoff has more than twenty years of experience in technology marketing. To learn more about Tealeaf, please visit www.tealeaf.com.