Champion's product team moved from user-generated error reports to an automated solution

Background

For over 100 years, Champion has been outfitting top performing athletes with sportswear worldwide. Beginning as a school uniform provider in Missouri, Champion has grown its brand to encompass a much wider range of products outside of their original line, including fashion pieces, shoes, loungewear, and accessories.

Now the company has expanded its success into the ecommerce market. We spoke to Eric Kelsey, the senior technical product manager, about how he manages Champion’s online store and works to maintain a seamless customer experience.

Challenge

Eric’s product team is tasked with ensuring that Champion’s ecommerce site stays stable and secure. Thus, they also handle a good portion of the web support work. For years, the product team had been detecting and addressing checkout errors in a way that is not all uncommon for major online retailers: relying on customer generated feedback and tickets.Eric knew that only a small percentage of bugs are ever reported to support teams, and without proper insight, Champion didn’t have a way to understand the true impact any one ticket was having on their conversion metrics. Without clear analytics, the product team would prioritize non revenue impacting errors that were easier to fix, leaving the time-consuming errors, which often had bigger impacts to the business, to sit at the back of their to-do list.After leading the team for some time, Eric felt the need for a more efficient and proactive way to deal with site errors.

Solution

Having a black box of errors with no information on revenue impact and conversion was not the route Eric wanted to take, and was quickly a fan when he heard that there could be a solution to shed light on both hidden and backlogged errors, without the need for manual QA testing.Having Noibu’s software would allow for a shift in focus away from their current system of solving customer-reported, internally-flagged user errors that were prioritized by the easiest and fastest to solve. Instead, the team could look to a live list of customer-facing errors prioritized by business impact and revenue loss.Besides moving away from an ad-hoc, customer-generated ticket queue to a data-backed, prioritized error list, Champion’s team could also better respond to tickets that customers were reporting but were unable to effectively communicate in an actionable way. With the platform in place, the team could find the associated ticket in Noibu and pair it with the exact error the customer experienced. Putting these together allowed for a faster solution and a better customer experience.

Outcome

Since implementing Noibu at Champion, Eric Kelsey and his team have solved 9 checkout bugs and have seen an over 18x ROI.In his words, “I think the impact that has been positive is that we have been able to resolve and address issues, without waiting for customer generated tickets, proactively and become better aligned on the impact of what we’re working on.”Eric explains that part of the key value that Champion has gotten from Noibu is that it lays out and identifies all the ongoing issues that are “actually really critical to the experience” and enables the product team to proactively resolve bugs.The platform provides front row seats to developers who can see all the work they could be doing to improve customer experience and conversion, with a business case to back it up.People in other departments now “know that there's a system out there that's proactively identifying issues.” When Champion team members go through the product team’s weekly deployment notes and there’s a Noibu ticket included, “it’s sort of like a bonus to them in the sense that there’s something that they didn’t know was a problem but that’s now not a problem for the consumers… They didn’t have to spend the time figuring that out for us.”

About Noibu

Serving SMBs and enterprise customers globally, Noibu is the industry leader in ecommerce error monitoring and lost revenue prevention. Noibu’s software platform monitors your ecommerce site and flags and prioritizes errors that prevent real customers from checking out, while collecting all the information required to quickly resolve them.