Premium womenswear brand Alice & Olivia was founded in 2002 by New York-based Stacey Bendet and is known for its vibrant and colorful collections that allow women to express their personal style with contemporary clothing.
Today, the brand has a presence in over 50 countries across the world and is available in over 800 select department and specialty stores worldwide. As for its digital footprint, Alice + Olivia’s eCommerce site is available internationally and ships to over 100 countries across the globe.
Alice + Olivia’s eCommerce team trusts Noibu with their error monitoring efforts and has been using the platform to drive tangible results that impact their key metrics in terms of reducing time to bug resolution, improving developer efficiency, and boosting conversions on their site.
In an effort to understand the team’s experience with Noibu, we recently sat down with Carrie McMahon, eCommerce Product Manager, Alice + Olivia to unpack what their eCommerce monitoring journey has looked like thus far.
Why Did Alice + Olivia’s eCommerce Team Choose Noibu?
Carrie and her team were introduced to Noibu through their external development agency. During the initial trial period, the team had some solid reasons to put their faith in the Noibu platform. The ability to view the impact of technical errors in terms of predicted annual revenue loss gave the leadership confidence in the platform and they were excited to see how the partnership could impact their business metrics.
At the time, Carrie and her team were also struggling with replicating a few checkout errors that were causing friction in the customer experience on their site. They were impressed to see Noibu not only detect those errors but also provide all the details on how to resolve them.
When they were exploring Noibu, the team already had a digital insights platform in their tech stack. While the tool offered insights into the user experience on their site and uncovered friction points in the customer journey, the agency realized that it did not provide any technical insights into website errors nor did it offer any help in terms of resolving bugs.
Also, since their external development agency already had experience working with the platform, Carrie was further at ease when choosing Noibu as she realized that the partnership would come with a negligible learning curve.
How Did Carrie and the External Dev Team Approach Website Errors Before Partnering with Noibu?
Before incorporating Noibu in their tech stack, Carrie’s team would either rely on employees to report errors that they experienced on the site via a Google Form or customers to call in and flag any errors they encountered.
In both scenarios, the challenge remained the same – reproducing the errors. Carrie’s team would try to reproduce the error at their end or open up a ticket in Jira for their external development partners to work on the issue. Ultimately, they would end up hitting walls in terms of not being able to reproduce efficiently based on the little information that was provided.
How Did the Error Monitoring Workflow Evolve with Noibu?
After partnering with Noibu, the team’s error-monitoring workflow evolved tremendously. Carrie and her team were now able to correlate customer complaints to user sessions to be able to pinpoint the root cause of the errors. Being able to filter sessions based on Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s session IDs made a world of difference in helping them find sessions easily.
The customer service team could now use Noibu’s Help Code to request users to report their sessions where they encountered errors. With the help of the unique pin generated by the #helpcode, Carrie’s team was able to identify sessions and pinpoint errors in no time.
For every error discovered by Noibu, Carrie and her team dive into the corresponding session recording by Noibu to understand what exactly happened. They would leverage Noibu’s integration with Jira to automatically create a ticket with the issue details provided by the platform.
The error monitoring workflow has evolved to the extent that Carrie’s team doesn’t necessarily need to review every error detected by the platform. Their development agency partner proactively keeps up with Noibu alerts and includes error tickets as part of their regular sprints.
Noibu also provided Alice + Olivia’s leadership with a very clear and comprehensive dashboard that highlights the business impact of site errors and identifies overall trends in website bugs. It allowed them to visualize the impact of the work that the team was doing to maintain a healthy digital presence.
Biggest Wins That Alice + Olivia Has Had with Noibu So Far
“The biggest win for us has been saving critical development hours. We were spending a lot of time replicating issues and we have been able to cut down on that with Noibu.”
Apart from being able to save precious development hours that can now be directed toward more strategic tasks, bringing on Noibu has been game-changing in terms of site conversions. They were able to resolve the majority of the issues in the checkout flow and boost their conversions around the Holiday season.
“Noibu has helped facilitate better communication with the customer service team and also ensured that the development agency is self-sufficient to address errors on their end without me having to bring them to their attention.”
Carrie also mentioned that the JavaScript errors chart in Google Analytics had really spiked over the past few months. Within the first month of signing up for Noibu and addressing the key JS errors in the dashboard, that chart in Google Analytics showed a significantly sharp drop in errors.
“That was a nice way to say that our goal wasn’t to just solve errors for the sake of it, but we solved the right errors and can see its impact.”
Noibu Features That Have Redefined Error Monitoring for Alice + Olivia
The integration with Jira has helped Carrie’s team create a direct path between Noibu errors and Jira tickets. Being able to sync issues in Jira and create tickets that already contain all the issue information has helped Carrie streamline the communication workflow with the third-party development team.
How Noibu Compares to Digital Experience Platforms in Their Tech Stack
Results that Noibu Has Helped Alice + Olivia Achieve
Carrie elaborates that the results that her team has achieved with Noibu in terms of preventing revenue loss and improving development efficiency are much more quantifiable in comparison to the impact of other tools in their stack.
“Noibu provides transparency into the way our code interacts with the third-party code and the integrations we have, especially the ones on our checkout flow. Sometimes, it’s hard to understand and separate our issues from those coming from third parties.”
