Founded in 1980 in Chicago, Pampered Chef is a global direct-selling l business that offers a wide range of kitchen tools, food products, and recipes to help its customers prepare meals at home. Their purpose is derived heavily from the company’s ethos, which is to inspire creativity in everyday cooking, simplify mealtimes, and offer professional-quality kitchen tools that stand the test of time.
Being a happy Noibu user for over 6 months now, the customer solutions team at Pampered Chef has been able to leverage the platform to optimize their error monitoring and resolution workflows to prevent friction in their online customer journeys.
To understand more about their experience with the platform so far and how they’ve been using it to boost their KPIs, we recently sat down with Nathan Armstrong, Director, Customer Solutions at Pampered Chef to unpack his team’s journey with Noibu.
Leading the customer solutions team at Pampered Chef, Nathan is responsible for optimizing the site’s customer experience, improving customer satisfaction scores, reducing technical support operations costs, and aligning their e-commerce tech stack with strategic business goals.
Let’s dive right into the key takeaways from our discussion:
Why Did Nathan and his Team Choose Noibu?
Right off the bat, we were curious to understand what made Nathan and his team excited about a platform like Noibu. Looking back to when Nathan decided to partner with Noibu, he was intrigued by the real-time intelligence and error trend information that the platform offered. He added that his team previously did not have access to any insights around issues that their site users were experiencing and how they impacted their shopping experience.
Most of the analytical and error information they relied on was on the backend while having little to no visibility into the front-end user experience.
Nathan shared that he knew there was a huge opportunity and potential to optimize Pampered Chef’s website for improved customer experience and conversion rates. He also recalled using a DXA tool before switching to Noibu which offered session recordings and some basic error information.
However, Noibu answered three key questions for his team:
- What were the top issues users were facing?
- Where were these issues impacting them in the shopping funnel?
- What were the exact technical errors that were causing those issues?
Having answers to all these questions and much more in-depth insights into the impact of technical errors on customer experience drove Nathan to explore Noibu. During the proof-of-concept trial period, the customer solutions team at Pampered Chef discovered site errors that they had no visibility into.
Nathan recalled one particular error that his team identified and resolved during the POC – this particular bug was preventing customers from checking out discounted items. With Noibu’s tag running on their website, they had access to the error information and its impact and could address it efficiently.
How Pampered Chef’s Error Resolution Workflow Evolved After Partnering with Noibu
Prior to using Noibu, the only visibility that Nathan and his team had into site errors was through backend error logs, customer complaints, or by reviewing random session recordings. They were very well aware that only about 10% of customers would potentially call in to report an error or issue, while others would simply abandon their purchase and go to a competitor.
During the pilot phase of using Noibu, Nathan and his team discovered a plethora of errors, some benign and others more impactful. In order to make the most of Noibu, Nathan’s team was looking for those needles in the haystack – the few errors making the biggest dent in their conversion rates and sales.
His team was quickly able to build a workflow around identifying those issues, discovering the degree of their impact, and prioritizing them among their other projects.
Results that Pampered Chef’s Customer Solutions Team has Achieved with Noibu
Increased awareness of technical issues
With the 360-degree visibility that Noibu offers, Nathan’s team has been able to discover errors in their online shopping funnel that were previously lurking as invisible conversion killers.
Reduced time to error resolution
Leading the customer service and technical support team, Nathan is responsible for his team’s error management and resolution efficiency. With Noibu as their error monitoring co-pilot, Nathan and his team have been able to significantly cut down on the total time to resolution for each error detected on the site by relying on the information provided by the platform to efficiently address high-priority issues.
Improved root cause analysis
Nathan compares his team’s error resolution process with Noibu to the one they followed before by relying simply on session recordings. With Noibu, they are provided with the technical details, specific funnel steps, and other information like device, OS, and browser type, which makes replication and root cause identification a breeze.
“A lot of times, our tech support agents weren’t as verbose as they needed to be in the tickets that they were opening for our engineers. So, the engineer had to basically go back and figure out on their own what was occurring.
With Noibu, our agents are able to connect the issue directly to Jira so when the engineering or product management team goes in, they can quickly just go to the ticket, click on the Noibu event, access all error information, and match that up with the bulleted feedback left by the tech support agent to understand the issue quickly.”
Helpful Noibu Features for the team at Pampered Chef
When talking about the team’s experience with Noibu, we wanted to particularly learn about features or functionalities that they heavily rely on and swear by. For the customer solutions team at Pampered Chef, it’s the following two features that have made all the difference:
Help Code
Noibu’s Help Code feature has changed the game for Nathan’s team as they are now able to efficiently address customer complaints based on the session recording, thus taking the guesswork out of the investigation. By simply requesting the customer to generate a Help Code whenever they get stuck, the team now has access to insights that they would earlier have to spend hours investigating.
Single Pane of Glass View into Site Issues
When talking about the team’s experience with Noibu, we wanted to particularly learn about features or functionalities that they heavily rely on and swear by. For the customer solutions team at Pampered Chef, it’s the following two features that have made all the difference:
Noibu provided Nathan’s team with a centralized dashboard that offers complete visibility into error information – including the error source, type, occurrence frequency, revenue impact, etc. Earlier, to capture all this error information, his team had to compile all that analytical data by digging through multiple systems and logs to create an error report. Now, his team can access all error data in just a couple of clicks under a single view.
What Makes Noibu Unique?
“The biggest gap that Noibu fills in our tech stack is providing front-end error detection capabilities, which allows us to be more proactive in addressing user issues quicker so that they’re not sitting out there for months or years without our knowledge. We can now see those and understand the full scope and impact of these errors for us to properly prioritize their resolution.”
Nathan also talks about Noibu’s ability to correlate errors to their revenue impact. He explained that if a user is not able to complete a funnel step due to an error, his team is now able to understand the revenue impact of the issue and is also able to compare it to the baseline conversion numbers provided by Noibu to gauge the scope of the impact.
“If the baseline conversion rate for a specific step in the funnel is 90% and we’re seeing that 30 of the user sessions faced a certain issue and none of them progressed, we can quickly quantify that revenue impact, and Noibu does that for us.”
Foreseeable Long-Term Impact of Noibu on Pampered Chef’s Business Goals
For Nathan’s team, the key metric that he foresees Noibu continuing to make a positive impact on is the site conversion rate. Nathan shares that he trusts Noibu to help preserve their site conversion rates and help incrementally improve by addressing errors efficiently.
In the coming months, Nathan foresees Noibu becoming a “must-have” tool in his team’s tech stack so that they no longer have to remind the leadership that it exists. As our partnership grows, Nathan’s vision is for the platform to be incorporated into the general troubleshooting process and day-to-day workflow of the tech support, customer service, product and engineering, and marketing teams so it can be used organization-wide to elevate the online customer journey.
“I think about Noibu as a virtual 24*7 tech support agent that lives on all of our pages and is looking for issues and bubbling them to us proactively, allowing us to deliver the best customer experience. When customers are not having a delightful experience, it brings up those issues to us and tells us exactly what to do to solve them.”
For Nathan and the customer solutions team at Pampered Chef, Noibu has helped uplevel their customer support efforts to provide efficient resolutions and deliver seamless online buying experiences. To know more about how Noibu can help your business achieve the same, sign up for a free checkout audit of your site to discover errors that could resolve to boost your conversion rate.
