Alerts are not just an ‘IT thing’ anymore, a discussion with Crate & Barrel

In this post, I sit down (AKA log into Zoom) with Eric Larsen from Crate and Barrel. Our discussion highlights how Eric and the eCommerce team at Crate & Barrel are navigating the rapid increase in digital traffic seen across the world. We also dive into Crate & Barrel’s use of Experience Alerts, Quantum Metric’s latest feature. See the overview video below to get a quick glimpse of Experience Alerts and read on to see a quick recap of our conversation.

Conversation Recap

Tell me a little bit about your role at Crate & Barrel

My official title is Manager of Continuous Improvement for eCommerce. I cover anything web-related. In general, I’m responsible for making sure our deployments go well. I also work pretty closely with our VoC team to analyze customer feedback after releases. If there is anything we need to fix or any significant learnings, that’s something I am focused on.

What brought your team to Quantum Metric in the first place?

First, we were looking for something that could put us out ahead of an issue before a customer tells us about it through a survey or something like that. The second is that we wanted to wrap some analytics around the issue. For example, how many customers are impacted and what is it costing us if we don’t fix it. Quantum has really helped us prioritize in that sense.

Let’s talk about Experience Alerts. How is your team using Quantum Metric’s new alerting functionality?

We use it in a few different ways but are still fairly new to the feature. We actually started with the marketing team. They are using it to monitor 404 pages. So if someone hits a 404 page, an alert is triggered and the team is notified via Slack. Then they dig into Quantum to quantify the issue (how many people is this impacting). This is great because now I don’t have to be the gatekeeper for issues like that. The marketing team can dig in themselves.

We have also set up some alerts on a few important pages. The order tracking page for example. We have an alert that looks for increased levels of errors or frustration past the norm. This is helpful because if that service is down or there is another error, folks naturally turn to the call center. This lets us proactively identify issues impacting our customers, rather than hearing about issues via the call center. Anytime we can reduce the volume to the call center, it is a big win given everything going on.

We are pretty heavy Slack users too, so being able to log into Slack every morning and check out the Quantum Alerts channel to see what’s going on is helpful. That integration is helpful.

What are some Experience Alerts you hope to set up in the future?

We want to continue by starting to track more of the user experience deeper in the funnel. So like looking at check out, let’s make sure we are staying on top of errors popping up or frustration. In general, we do everything possible to increase our visibility and make the lives of our customers easier. Being able to be proactive about that and enable other teams to be proactive is a focus for us.

So why are Experience Alerts different?

While most alerting focuses on the system (servers, outages, cloud performance, etc), Experience Alerts focuses on the customer and what they are actually experiencing and doing. Experience Alerts allows you to query and monitor across petabytes of data, intelligently surfacing what matters most through historical benchmarking. This helps you eliminate noise and activate your teams when it matters. If you want to learn more about Experience Alerts request a demo!