How Carrefour’s ongoing use of Noibu helps the ecommerce team reach success
Carrefour’s Belgium ecommerce department brought on Noibu back in March of 2021 to deal with a number of challenges facing the ecommerce and development teams.
After over a year of using the tool, Jean Philippe Blerot, Head of Digital and Ecommerce projects, Olivier De Koster, Ecommerce Product Owner, and Jessica Varisano, Digital Product Owner, sat down with us to share how their use of Noibu has evolved over time and why the tool is considered a crucial part of their long-term tech stack.
What challenge was Carrefour ultimately trying to solve?
Ultimately, Jean Philippe and his team boiled their struggles down to 3 main ongoing challenges. The team was having trouble: catching existing and new errors on their site, prioritizing support tickets and errors, and identifying the root causes of issues.
Before the implementation of Noibu, Jean Philippe noted that the support team was being inundated with tickets due to site errors that were going undetected. With his ecommerce team being heavily focused on building a frictionless buyer's-journey, the knowledge that there were live errors on their site was quite a concern.
“You must be customer centric. And to be customer centric, you need to ensure that the customer journey is fully without friction,” Jean Philippe stated.
“Our work is to build the customer journey without any friction and with the best UX.”
— Jean Philippe Blerot, Head of Digital & Ecommerce
Errors on their website were preventing that from being the case.
“We were aware of issues before Noibu, we could see them, but there wasn’t enough information to relate back to the issue at a code line level,” said Olivier, highlighting the team’s historical issue with trying to find an error’s root cause.
Jessica shared, “The biggest pain point was that we couldn’t find exactly where on the code the issue was, and it was very difficult to dive into the code in order to see what provoked the issue.”
Not having the granular data available to identify the root cause of an error created a time-drain for the development team, too.
“We could replicate [an error], but in order to do that, many of our developers need to try and replicate the error to confirm its validity. And even if we find and validate a bug, we don’t actually know what needs to be done in order to solve it.”
— Jean Philippe Blerot, Head of Digital & Ecommerce
The lack of full visibility into all site errors, coupled with the lack of business revenue impact data associated with those errors, made the task of prioritizing error-resolutions very difficult. Essentially, the ecommerce team was left to guess which support tickets should be addressed first.
Jean Phillipe and his team knew they needed a data-driven approach to addressing errors, and they found Noibu to fill that gap.
How did Noibu in the short term?
At the start, the initial work of clearing the technical backlog uncovered by Noibu was top priority for the business. It helped eliminate long-standing bugs and plug up existing holes in Carrefour’s ecommerce funnel.
With the added business-impact visibility, the team was able to work through their backlog of errors based on how much each error was causing the most revenue loss. The team can now definitively point to any error and know they are working on the most pressing issue to the business as a whole.
The additional benefit of the data contained in Noibu’s developer tab also helped to expedite the developers’ error resolution process, allowing for the team to publish resolutions much more rapidly than before.
How does Noibu help in the long term?
Carrefour’s team had great success in the first 4 months tackling the initial backlog of issues, amounting to over $383k in annualized revenue that could’ve been lost if those errors persisted. But it didn’t stop there!
Noibu’s platform isn’t designed to be a set-it-and-forget-it tool, or to be used as a one-off tool to eliminate existing errors that had previously been unknown. It’s built to improve, maintain, and support the health of ecommerce sites, while helping teams create more efficient workflows.
With hundreds of news ways to navigate to and around a site (think of all the different devices, IOS and operating system versions, browsers, browser extensions, ad blockers), and the countless number of third-party plugins that go into an ecommerce store (here’s why this can create an issue), the risk of new errors being introduced or falling through the cracks is ever-growing.
And in order to effectively operate a best-in-class ecommerce department, one that is successful and efficient well into the future, a few key abilities need to be in place to combat the ongoing error prevalence:
- The ability to know that all newly introduced customer-impacting errors will be detected,
- To clearly see the business impact of all errors to allow for quick prioritization based on key metrics,
- Be able to capture relevant contextual information to understand what caused these errors, and
- Ultimately provide all the necessary steps to solve bugs efficiently.
Carrefour shared why they firmly believe this to be true, and how Noibu continues to enable these critical abilities.
With ongoing access to the granular data needed to identify the root causes of all new or existing errors, the development team continues to be able to streamline their replication and resolution workflows. Using Noibu, the team is able to greatly reduce the amount of time and resources their developers would have previously had to dedicate to error resolutions.
“It’s all about [maintaining] the quality of the code and to help the development team work quickly,” Jean Philippe says of the importance of having Noibu on long-term, “Because if [our team] did not have a tool like Noibu, I presume it would take a minimum of one week to understand the bug, and two weeks to try and solve it.”
“Time is money so it’s important for us to help the team work quickly.”
— Jean Philippe Blerot, Head of Digital & Ecommerce
Now, with the initial backlog cleared and the focus moving towards code health, quality of delivery, and website maintenance, the team dedicates about 10-20% of their sprint tasks to address Noibu-detected bugs, only just a small fraction of what they used to have to dedicate to error-resolutions.
All in all, Jean Philippe concludes that the biggest win with having Noibu onboard long term is the ongoing “prioritization and the help for our development team to find their way in our [error tickets].”
With the peace of mind knowing that all errors are being reported on, that the team can immediately know which bug fixes should be prioritized, and that their developers can more easily and efficiently come to error resolutions, Jean Philippe’s team can look to the future and worry about what new innovations or projects are coming down the pipeline, rather than whether or not their website is healthy.
To date, Carrefour Belgium has seen an annualized ROI of 49.5x
