British retailer Jigsaw has expanded over the past four decades to include 40 UK stores and a thriving e-commerce business. To protect both the performance and ultimately the profitability of its website, Jigsaw uses thinkTRIBE unique user journey monitoring service. In particular, thinkTRIBE provides much needed visibility into the performance of 3rd partiesinvolved with the site.
Challenge
Jigsaw’s focus on website performance is all about protecting its bottom line. According to Josh Towb, Web Trading Manager at Jigsaw,
“If we lose revenue due to poor website performance, it may not be my fault, but it’s definitely my responsibility.”
Josh looks after the day-to-day management of Jigsaw’s UK website, the largest ecommerce outfit in the group which also includes Jigsaw London in the US and The Shop at Bluebird. He and his team rely on thinkTRIBE user journeys to monitor how the website performs as a whole ecommerce operation as well as to help supervise the various 3rd parties that deliver valuable services to the website.
“Our business is focused on being very reliable with a high level of customer service,” he continues “We aim always to deliver beyond the expectations of our customers. That is the core of our business and thinkTRIBE helps us to achieve this.”
Solution
Peace-of-mind with 3rd parties
The re-launch of its website in 2012 with BT Fresca as its new hosting partner prompted Jigsaw to find an independent view of what was happening on the ground and assurance that everything is working.
“We didn’t want to be in the position where members of the public could see that something was wrong before us,”
explains Josh.
“And whilst we have every confidence in our providers, we wanted peace of mind and a check on what they were telling us.”
thinkTRIBE was brought on board to deliver its unique user journey monitoring service. It captures the fine details on how a user experiences Jigsaw’s website from searching for products and adding them to basket, through to checkout flow and payment processing.
“The service picked up immediately on a number of issues and gave us the root cause of the problems to present to suppliers. Essentially thinkTRIBE gave us a visual target, making it easy to dip deeper into the details to find the exact source of a problem.”
Jigsaw also works with a number of third parties, “They are a key part of our offering and provide ways for customers to interact with us. With thinkTRIBE, we can ensure that their services are keeping pace with us.” Social media links, for example, are scattered across the site; Jigsaw can now be certain that these links do not cause any performance issues.
Josh adds, “thinkTRIBE was particularly useful when some quirky glitches came to light relating to payment steps. thinkTRIBE was able to alert us before our payment provider and even before the customer. This was extremely valuable as we could then advise our Customer Services team and they were able to help customers to complete their purchases – a direct impact on the bottom line.”
Catching the devil in the detail
In addition to the user journey monitoring, Jigsaw runs quick static tests of different pages.
“We can compare the two to see if there are any underlying problems with the hosted solution. It gives us two points of reference to eliminate different issues,” explains Josh.
“We find thinkTRIBE historical reporting capability extremely valuable. It enables us to see if an issue has been developing over time. We can check the timescale and determine at what point things were failing, if other elements were failing at the same time and what impact they might have on each other.”
Josh and his team can also look at less urgent issues and trends such as page load times compared to page size.
“Whilst we have had no specific problems and page load times are fast, it’s always a good discipline to check.”
Working benefits
Josh concludes, “thinkTRIBE has given us a level of clarity and detail that we weren’t expecting. The user interface is extremely visual and intuitive which means staff can be trained quickly and the alerts can be managed easily; sent to mobiles out of hours and re-directed if someone is on holiday.”
“What I particularly like about thinkTRIBE is that when I’ve made a suggestion for new features, they are implemented. Recently, I was keen to have some dynamic data incorporated in the reporting and it was delivered within the next product release cycle – in less than 3 months – which was excellent.”
