Founded in 1974, Graham and Green is a proudly family-run furniture and home accessories business that has four stores across London and the South West UK as well as a growing online presence.
Continuing their 40-year legacy of traveling the world to explore inspirational lifestyle products, the brand is known for their contemporary and classic designs of eclectic home furnishings and collectibles.
Having been a Noibu customer for 2 years now, Graham and Green’s e-commerce team has been leveraging the platform to resolve website errors and optimize their digital storefront proactively.
To unpack their experience with Noibu so far and learn how they’ve been making the most of the platform, we recently spoke with Matthew Medlyn, Head of E-commerce at Graham and Green.
In his role, he works closely with an external development agency to resolve technical website issues and optimize user experiences. So let’s recap why he chose Noibu for his error monitoring strategy and how his journey has been.
Why Did Graham and Green Choose Noibu?
At the time of evaluating Noibu, Matthew was no stranger to error detection tools. Having been an e-commerce developer himself, he had considerable experience working with tools that detect and alert technical teams of website errors.
For Matthew, what stood out about Noibu was the insights that the platform offered. He talked about how he’s used multiple tools in the past that detect and record site errors, something even Google Tag Manager offers. However, the technical insights that Noibu offers were very new to him, which is what prompted him to explore Noibu for his team.
He was also particularly impressed with the degree of transparency that Noibu offered, which would empower his development team to stay ahead of site issues instead of reactively addressing them.
Finally, he talked about how Noibu’s error prioritization framework sealed the deal for him. For his team, finding impactful errors was very much of a needle-in-a-haystack situation. His team was constantly looking for ways to prioritize what to work on next and find issues to resolve based on impact instead of frequency of occurrence.
Matthew highlighted that almost all tools he’s used before only captured errors but only Noibu provided insight into how those errors impacted the user experience and how they can be resolved.
“If you’re purely prioritizing based on the number of errors thrown, you’re wasting your efforts that could be directed towards solving customer problems.”
Noibu’s ability to correlate errors with session recordings is also what stood out to Matthew. He talked to our team about how Noibu took the guesswork out of the equation. “You no longer have to dig out a Samsung Galaxy 7 to try and recreate a specific user’s experience.” said Matthew.
Experience with Noibu’s Proof-of-Concept
During the POC process, Matthew recalls discovering and fixing a specific Apple Pay error on the Graham and Green website. There was an issue with the way the Apple Pay dialogue was interacting with the website’s shipping system – the postal code was being passed and processed in an incorrect format.
Once it was detected during the POC trial by the Noibu team, Matthew’s team was able to quickly address it to avoid any missed sales opportunities and prevent considerable damage to the top line.
Graham and Green’s Error Monitoring Workflow Before Using Noibu
Before the team started relying on Noibu to detect revenue-impacting bugs on their site, all they used was Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to get alerted of any errors. There were multiple issues with that workflow:
- First, since it was dependent on Google Tag Manager, any errors that occurred before the GTM was loaded were not detected.
- Most of the errors detected by GTM were vague or ambiguous, providing no real information on how they could be addressed.
- Prioritization was majorly based on the frequency of occurrence. To manually gauge impact, Matthew would have to create a segment of users who faced a particular error and then analyze where they fell off in the checkout to prioritize better – which was a long and painful process.
How the Team’s Proactive Error Monitoring Workflow Evolved with Noibu
Here’s how Matthew and the development team at Graham and Green started using Noibu to transform their proactive error monitoring workflow:
- Grooming of issues: Matthew regularly visits the Noibu dashboard to review all new issues and sort them by predicted revenue loss.
- Reviewing top issues: Matthew then goes through session highlights for the top priority issues and pins anything important. He also analyzes the stack trace corresponding to priority issues to understand where they are occurring.
- Judgment call on fixability and impact: He then makes a judgment call and shortlists high-priority issues that are fixable and have the highest impact.
- Syncing with Jira: He would sync those top issues to Jira and all those tickets would automatically get added to the next development sprint to be addressed on priority by the agency.
- Error resolution: Since their external developers have direct access to the Noibu, they are able to directly jump in and quickly resolve issues sprint by sprint.
Biggest Wins Since Using Noibu
Replicability of Site Errors
By providing all the technical details developers need to reproduce errors, Noibu takes the guesswork out of the process. Before using Noibu, developers would first need to decide whether the issue at hand is reproducible or not before moving on to actually resolve it. However, they can now easily replicate bugs and spend more time resolving than investigating.
Proving the Validity of Site Bugs
Before using Noibu, Matthew would first need to figure out and prove the validity of a bug to his development team. They didn’t have a tool that provided the information they needed to be sure that an error was real and had an actual impact on the customer experience and revenue. With Noibu, that changed completely. They no longer have to focus on proving the validity of a bug but can redirect their efforts into prioritizing and efficiently addressing them.
Speed of Error Resolution
Thanks to session recordings and stack trace information provided by Noibu, Matthew and his team are able to significantly reduce the time to error resolution and save a huge portion of their bandwidth that was earlier spent on replicating and resolving errors with little to no information.
“For me, the biggest gain has been time savings. I’m spinning too many plates on a day-to-day basis, but I no longer have to spend time proving to developers that there is a problem. Website errors are something I don’t have to spend hours digging into.”
How Noibu’s Help Code Has Been Game-Changing for Graham and Green
“Help Code by far is my favorite feature. It’s truly a Godsend.”
When working with the customer service department, Matthew talks about how his team would get very little error information on the exact issue the customer was facing. Since both the customer as well as the support representative aren’t technically savvy, the nitty-gritty of the issue is very much lost in translation. Noibu’s Help Code provides Matthew and his development team with a closer and more direct view of the customer experience and the exact issue that they are facing.
Closing Thoughts
For Matthew, the biggest win after using Noibu has been the reclamation of his time that was earlier spent going back and forth with developers trying to prove to them the validity of errors and then investigating each bug with little context.
“For me, Noibu is like a customer experience insurance policy living as an error triaging resolution platform.”
If you’re curious about how Noibu can help you and your development teams save hours detecting, prioritizing, and resolving errors, sign up for a free checkout audit of your site to explore the platform for yourself.
