Introduction
We sat down with Jen Pearson, VP of Information Technology & eCommerce at Oak & Fort to discuss the value Noibu brought to their eCommerce business operations as a new customer.
Oak & Fort is a contemporary fashion house that was founded in 2010 in Vancouver, Canada. The brand offers attainable luxury through modern essentials, creating timeless pieces with a minimalistic approach. Oak & Fort has 41 brick and mortar locations, working alongside their global eCommerce operations.
Jen is responsible for all the technology on the eCommerce side and oversees Oak & Fort’s development team. In this case study, we’ll unravel the biggest challenges Oak & Fort’s digital team face and the steps leading to why the business chose Noibu as a solution to help achieve their goals.
The Problem(s)
Before landing on Noibu’s doorstep, Jen and her team were faced with a few critical challenges:
They were heavily reliant on feedback from client experience team and c-level executives for flagging errors, with not enough information to reproduce or solve for most of the time.
She had a small development team of two, of which were mainly inundated with operations and tackling errors, rather than pushing new features and updates.
Frequent releases were being pushed, which were amplifying the introduction of new errors.
There is a large number of third party tools that are integrated through their eCommerce platform, which has also been a cause for bugs and headaches.
Our team quickly realized that there was a missing link between how Jen’s team was detecting errors and the overall workflow of gathering enough relevant information to reproduce and resolve.
According to her, the dev team used to receive reports of bugs, which resulted in them having to reproduce the issue. Even with descriptions from their client experience team, it was challenging to obtain precise information like the specific browser, device used, and steps followed. This made reproducing the bugs almost impossible.
“Our dev team spent eons trying to reproduce bugs often and I can tell you that of our backlog, we aren’t super successful at being able to solve a lot of them”
To make matters more challenging, Oak & Fort’s eCommerce team is a fairly active one, typically launching drops, promotions, sales, website banners, and other projects multiple times each week. Jen points out that “[Noibu’s] alerting feature was something that everyone was very excited about because without in-depth QA, when we have promotions and such, the more traffic we get and that’s really when people are gonna find more bugs.”
The Solution
When Oak + Fort found out about Noibu, it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine. In fact, there was an uncertainty around the legitimacy of the bugs that were found by our own QA team, and rightfully so.
However, the team at Oak + Fort were in a position where they needed to act on bugs quickly. They didn’t want just another tool that would simply provide evidence of errors, they needed solutions. Leadership knew they had issues on their website, like 99% of top eCommerce brands face as well, stating “I feel like there’s so many bugs on the website, it’s impacting customers, but we need to get to the bottom of the overall damage it’s causing.”
“…we know that there is definitely friction but there’s also a path forward now with Noibu…”
Jen’s ability to detect errors as a regression to their ongoing releases, prioritize dev resources based on revenue impact, and utilize granular stacktrace views and gather session information were all pivotal in streamlining their team’s operations. It quickly checked all the boxes for their needs.
Now was the time for Oak & Fort to put Noibu through the test with our two week website monitoring audit.
After having Noibu’s tag deployed, Jen and her team walked through the details provided in the platform of a high value bug and were able to reproduce it 100% of the time, as well as fix the problem at hand within 24 hours. In that period, the team learned that they would be able to leverage the platform to close out bugs quickly, and find value in Noibu at the onset. As Jen put it, “it really opened my eyes to what was possible.”
“I would say that this was the least amount of time that our team has ever been able to resolve an issue”
But what about her technical team? Were they going to be simply thrown a whole new list of new bugs for them to work on? The reality was that they were about to receive a platform that would provide a more in-depth look at the root causes, allowing them to debug with confidence, and reduce the overall time spent on website errors. This left Oak & Fort’s developers feeling excited to “get concrete details” as they were admittedly growing tired of the bugs that they just couldn’t seem to reproduce.
At the end of it all, the business as a whole was confident that Noibu would be critical for them to and immediately allowed them to do so with less time and effort.
Getting Started
For Jen, getting started with Noibu proved to be even easier than our team initially led on. The whole process was painless and the team was able to deploy the tag to begin monitoring their site in less than five minutes.
“I cannot emphasize enough how easy it is. In most cases you probably wouldn’t even need your dev teams to do it.”
As the team geared up to begin learning more about the platform, there were a few features that Jen highlighted as being the most important to the stakeholders in the decision making process:
Integration with Jira – in order for her to be able to push the tool into their usual prioritization flow.
Unlimited users – to assign as many team members as she wanted, so that everyone could have a view on website issues and be alerted to act proactively.
Help Code – allowing their team to get better feedback internally and externally.
eCommerce Alerts – as mentioned early in this article.
Prioritization workflow – to easily determine which errors to action for developers.
Jen pointed out that while there are other website monitoring or session recording software options available that they have looked into and personally used, the differentiating factor for her was the lack of actionable insight and upfront detail in most of them. This, according to her, is the “secret sauce equation” of Noibu for Oak & Fort. She went on to commend the high level of support provided, which made everyone involved feel comfortable and confident moving forward, unlike many other typical self-serve tools.
30/60/90
The team at Oak & Fort went through two in depth training sessions with the Noibu team and is already working with their dedicated CSM to hit the floor running in the first few months.
Jen emphasized the team’s eagerness to tackle the top-five bugs impacting revenue in the first month or so. Noibu’s data into how Oak & Fort fared against other companies was highly valuable to their leadership in determining the website’s current health, and where to begin.
The team also started off enabling their c-level executives and client experience team right away on Noibu’s help code feature, and has immediate plans to include this on their website for customer usage. The team also has plans to integrate Noibu’s reports and data within their internal KPI metrics to increase visibility company wide.
Conclusion
This case study of Oak & Fort demonstrates the importance of proactive problem-solving and the value of partnering with Noibu from the get-go.
Jen, VP of Information Technology & eCommerce at Oak & Fort, was able to identify a reproducible, high value bug through Noibu and resolve the issue in record time to prevent any further harm to the business’ bottom line.
This case study highlights how important it is for eCommerce businesses to be proactive in their error detection and resolution strategies. With Noibu’s help, Oak & Fort was able to save both time and money and found value in our platform as a critical part of their ongoing eCommerce techstack.
