alphabroder, a leading supplier of apparel and imprintable goods, serves athletic team dealers, screen printers, embroiderers, and online retailers nationwide.
After two months with Noibu, alphabroder is just beginning their journey with proactive error monitoring. To understand why they chose Noibu, we explored their experience with our proof of concept (POC) trial.
During the 2-week POC period, Noibu’s tag was deployed on alphabroder’s website, allowing their team to grasp the platform’s functionality and providing us with detailed insights into their e-commerce funnel.
We recently sat down with Kathryn Hutchison, VP of E-commerce at alphabroder, to hear her thoughts on Noibu’s POC trial and the insights her team uncovered during this period.
Introduction to Noibu and First Impressions
Kathryn first discovered Noibu as a result of a competitor audit that revealed one of alphabroder’s leading competitors was using Noibu for their error monitoring. She was immediately impressed by Noibu’s unique analytics capabilities, unlike anything she had seen before in her career.
Later that year, Kathryn met with Noibu’s team at Shoptalk Las Vegas, where she was looking for providers to enhance alphabroder’s tech stack. She had the chance to demo the platform and discuss how Noibu could help alphabroder eliminate revenue-impacting bugs on their website.
“The demo was really impressive. My first impression was that Noibu could be a really good fit for some of our needs and fill some gaps that we have in our analytics tooling.”
Key Challenges Before Partnering with Noibu
alphabroder’s main challenge was connecting customer complaints to their website analytics. Their existing tools couldn’t provide the necessary insight into customer issues, making it difficult to enhance customer experience and satisfaction.
While their existing analytics tools provided some value, they weren’t sufficient for significantly enhancing customer experience and satisfaction. To address this, they focused a product manager on addressing the backlog of website bugs using a manually created prioritization model.
Despite investigating and resolving many bug tickets, the team struggled to quantify the impact of these errors and establish an efficient process for managing customer complaints.
After Kathryn demoed the platform, she recognized that Noibu could bridge these gaps and tackle their challenges effectively.
“We were losing a ton of time replicating issues. We realized that our current analytics capabilities, both on the website and SysOps, weren’t giving us enough details for our developers to effectively identify and solve problems.
So, quantifying error impact, efficient prioritization, and providing technical details are the gaps that I saw Noibu filling in our tech stack.”
The Team’s Experience with the POC Trial Process
The POC process gave alphabroder a glimpse into how Noibu could eliminate website friction caused by technical errors. Our team worked closely with Kathryn to address any concerns and provide a thorough understanding of the platform’s capabilities.
Here’s how the POC process proved to be helpful for their team:
Creating a Solid Business Case to Get Leadership Buy-in
The first major win from the POC process was creating a business case for Noibu to present to the leadership team. Our team helped Kathryn convey the importance of addressing website bugs.
“The sales rep was really amazing. He really listened and did a great job of understanding our business and presenting to the executive team, specifically what was relevant to alphabroder. None of the other partners we looked at got to that kind of level of trust. Noibu really made the business case for error monitoring as a discipline.”
It was important to convey that having site issues doesn’t mean that your tech stack is broken or your developers aren’t able to resolve errors. Bugs are inevitable even on healthy e-commerce websites and Noibu provides a more effective way to address them.
Providing a Glimpse Into How Noibu Connects Customer Experiences to Analytics
One of the most significant insights Kathryn and her team gained during the POC process was seeing how Noibu connects customer sessions to error analytics. Previously, alphabroder’s dev team spent hours investigating bugs or searching for error information on GA. Noibu presented an opportunity to streamline their bug management process by pinpointing exact customer sessions and error details within a single dashboard.
This meant they no longer had to repeatedly reach out to customers for more information about their complaints. Instead, they could access all necessary error details through one comprehensive view.
“It would be priceless to never have to call a customer and ask them for details about the issues they are facing. It’s worth every penny.”
Improving Customer Relationships and Boosting Satisfaction
The POC process provided Kathryn’s team with a clear view of all the error details at their disposal for resolving issues. For her team, the Noibu platform not only helped in fixing bugs but also streamlined the way they addressed customer complaints.
By no longer needing to rely on customers for more information, and resolving issues quickly, they realized they could strengthen their relationships and boost satisfaction.
“With Noibu, we are able to turn that customer conversation around to – ‘I’m so sorry that was an inconvenience to you. I believe you. I have everything I need to replicate the error and I’m going to share it with my developers.’ Noibu has helped bring about a really big change in how we receive and process customer complaints.”
Uncovering Issues Not Reported By Customers
Before discovering Noibu, Kathryn’s team relied solely on customer calls and emails to uncover site issues. During Noibu’s POC process, they discovered numerous errors on their site that customers hadn’t reported.
“There was an error on our site that I’d experienced myself but since no customer had called in to report it and we didn’t have any information on it, we figured that it wasn’t worth investigating. During Noibu’s POC, we realized that it was affecting thousands and thousands of customers. So, that was pretty eye-opening for us.”
Kathryn also mentioned a persistent login issue that had been on their website since 2022. Developers had tried replicating it but always hit a dead end. With Noibu, her team found that there were actually six issues on the login screen. Using Noibu’s detailed insights, they resolved these six issues within a few weeks.
After Noibu’s POC process, it became clear to Kathryn that only a small percentage of customers experiencing site issues actually report them. They needed a proactive system to detect and resolve errors.
Discovering Noibu’s Session Recordings Capabilities
Before partnering with Noibu, alphabroder’s development team relied on a session replay tool to gain insights into customer issues. However, this process was time-consuming as they spent hours trying to pinpoint the exact errors. With Noibu, which directly links errors to customer sessions, they no longer need to manually sift through sessions to find the corresponding error.
Learning About Noibu’s Integration with Jira
Kathryn’s team was thrilled to discover how Noibu’s integration with Jira streamlines issue management. This integration allows issues identified in Noibu to be directly synced to Jira, creating tickets with all the necessary details for developers to address the problems efficiently.
“We are on a platform that is less commonly used, so it’s not the same as being on Shopify or Salesforce, which have pretty common integrations. Sometimes there are third-party tools that just don’t work well for us. It was really confidence-inspiring seeing Noibu find very relevant issues even on our platform.”
Understanding Noibu’s Revenue Impact Analysis
One of the standout features for Kathryn was Noibu’s ability to assign a potential dollar value to each error. This capability gave her the confidence to allocate resources effectively towards bug management and demonstrate the financial impact of their efforts.
Results Achieved From Noibu’s POC Process
During the 16-day POC period, Noibu’s tag on alphabroder’s website detected a total of 1,149 errors, with 122 classified as high-priority, impacting 104,742 visitors.
Would alphabroder Recommend Noibu’s POC Process?
“I would very much recommend it. I think one of the very positive things about Noibu is that it has helped our existing team work better. So, if I had to make a decision to choose a tool that would allow the existing product and engineering team to work seamlessly together, it would be Noibu.
It’s been great seeing Noibu enable our internal teams to feel fulfilled in their roles as well as help our customer experience improve.”
alphabroder has been using the platform for only a few months, but Kathryn is confident that her team is maximizing its potential. She believes that within six months, Noibu will significantly contribute to achieving their revenue goals. Interested in exploring Noibu for your business? Sign up for a demo of the platform here.
