Watch out, Home Depot and Lowe’s: A burgeoning home improvement e-tailer is targeting your customers through a series of web portals that range from the specific (FaucetDirect.com) to the general.

“We tap a lot of different areas of home improvement, and that’s kind of what each website is focused on,” says Dieter Davis, director of business intelligence for Chico, Calif.-based Improvement Direct. “Plumbing, plumbing and faucets, lighting, door hardware, bending products, tools, home decor — they each have their own different marketing strategy, different product spread.”

At FaucetDirect.com — the most-visited of the company’s 15 sites — consumers can find faucets for kitchens and bathrooms, as well as all the accessories one would need to spruce up the vanity. VentingDirect.com, more of a business-to-business site, offers air conditioners, bath fans, ceiling fans, range hoods, skylights and accessories.

The company also operates general sites like MoreHome.com, ImprovementDirect.com and StockBlowout.com. This network receives about 800,000 unique visitors and 11 million page views per month, Davis says.

Improvement Direct’s sites send and receive a good deal of cross traffic. In the lower left corner of each site’s homepage are store links, which consumers can use to navigate to another site. “We have converted a lot of people from one of our other micro websites,” Davis says.

All Improvement Direct sites use the same checkout process and send the Network Newsletter to their customers, providing additional opportunities to cross- or up-sell.

The various sites have garnered positive reviews from Bizrate.com, the Better Business Bureau, NexTag, Shopping.com and Google Checkout. Its manufacturer-trained in-house product and customer service specialists quickly answer consumer questions by phone, fax, e-mail or via live chat, and a new solution, Tealeaf CX, has made the company’s customer experience even better.

A comprehensive data store of online customer information and the engine behind all Tealeaf products, Tealeaf CX allows Improvement Direct to passively capture and manage all visitor interactions on its network of e-commerce sites.

“Tealeaf very positively impacts our company culture by opening lines of communication on customer experience and providing truly actionable information,” says Christian Friedland, president of Improvement Direct.

Tealeaf CX records the HTTP request and response data by "sniffing" TCP/IP packets from the network via an existing span port or network tap. Tealeaf CX provides a non-intrusive, real-time method to capture what every customer is doing and seeing on the page across the entire session. The solution is ideal for the multi-domain approach, Davis says.

Total visibility
“We can see everything — all the data from our websites — at a glance,” he says. “While you do want to get individual information about a single website, the ability to have both segmented views and overhead views are very important, especially to department heads or executives [who] make actionable decisions.”

Davis says Tealeaf helps fix problems before a customer becomes frustrated and leaves the site. “We’ve actually had some cases of server issues, and IT was able to jump on that specific server to fix it while the customers were still browsing,” he says.

And in e-commerce, it’s all about keeping the customer on the site: According to Tealeaf, 42 percent of the people experiencing problems will immediately abandon the transaction or switch to a competitor.

“If I’m at Improvement Direct’s site and I can’t buy the Kohler faucet I want, what do I do? I hit the back button, go to Google and search Kohler faucets, and it brings up maybe thousands of results of other places I can buy a Kohler faucet,” says Geoff Galat, vice president of marketing and strategy for Tealeaf.

Track customer experience
Galat says Tealeaf gives Improvement Direct the ability to observe the actual customer experience for every interaction. CX “goes across all those sessions and analyzes the segment to see if you can bubble up interesting things.”

One of these reports might find data to support that the site doesn’t work well with Safari or Netscape, but works just fine with Internet Explorer. Or, it might address the fact that 50 web servers are working correctly but five are not, or that anonymous customers were being treated differently than “logged in” customers.

Before the company implemented Tealeaf CX, Improvement Direct programmers might “spend days or weeks of their time to figure this stuff out,” Davis says. “Some of them say they couldn’t have accomplished [a particular task] without Tealeaf.”

And there is no longer the need to replicate a problem in order to correct it, Davis says. “You have the session as it was recorded: That whole diagnosis portion is taken off.”