Safeway.com used the software to determine why a new version of a feature on its website that lets shoppers edit their grocery orders wasn’t working properly. Customers had complained that changes they had made to their orders using the order edit function weren’t sticking. So the online grocer set the software to monitor what happens when people tried to edit their orders. Joe Devine, Safeway.com’s CTO at the time the software was deployed (the current CTO, David Popejoy, came on board in October 2004), says the data that the software collected showed that customers’ changes weren’t taking because customers didn’t realize they had to click an additional button to process them. Within an hour of making that discovery, Devine’s developers created more prominent instructions on the webpage telling customers they had to click one more button, and the problem was solved.

Devine likes the intent processor because it makes technical and usability problems easier to diagnose. He says it’s also simpler to use than most Web monitoring tools, because he didn’t have to run debugging code or add tags to his pages in order to create logs. In addition, he used the software for more traditional Web monitoring functions, such as keeping track of users’ activity on Safeway.com (known as session management), playing back users’ sessions, as well as collecting metrics.

Devine won’t provide numbers, but says that between the money he saved by replacing older Web monitoring tools and the increases in sales that came from quickly fixing problems with the site, his ROI reached seven figures within eight months of deploying the software.

"If you improve the customer experience, ease of use and navigability on your site, you get significant returns," says author Rayport. Timberland, Manheim, Ikea and Safeway.com can testify to that. And since so many websites remain shackled by HTML, there’s plenty of room for your company to start using these new technologies to differentiate your site from the rest of the pack.