The success of an eCommerce company depends upon a website's functionality, so internal users–the eCommerce company's employees–spend as much time exploring the site's frontend as their shoppers do... if not more! An obvious benefit to this close attention is that an employee may discover an issue before it actively impacts shopper conversion and affects revenue.
However, this perk comes with downsides:
- Often, an issue reported by an executive-level employee will be prioritized immediately, even if the issue has yet to make a significant impact. This can lead to impactful issues being deprioritized.
- These issues may be observed after hours, or the employee may be relaying an issue experienced by a friend or family member, and the report may lack substantial details. This leads to developers searching through sessions based on vague, anecdotal information.
Employee-reported issues should be treated much like shopper-reported issues. We recommend creating and enforcing a process for reporting issues internally, making use of the Noibu toolbox. Because an employee experiencing an issue knows the NoibuJS is monitoring their session, they can assemble a support ticket with details that will help developers find their session in the Noibu console and determine whether the problem is revenue-impacting and worth prioritizing.
We recommend creating a ticket template to simplify this process.
Reporting an issue in real-time
The easiest way for an employee to report an issue they're experiencing in real-time is to Generate a Help Code. The help code is a six-digit pin that customer support teams use to connect real-time issue reports to session recordings in the Noibu console. With a help code, an employee can give their support team a direct map to their session recording.
To generate a help code, add #helpcode to the end of your URL, and hit enter. The code will appear in a modal. Submit this code along with a description of the problem in your support ticket.
[help-code-url]
[help-code-modal]
Reporting an issue after it occurs
In some cases, the employee may be unable to provide a help code. Maybe they forgot, or maybe they're relaying an issue experienced by a friend or family member. Your reporting process should accommodate this eventuality. While a help code provides the most direct link from a real-time issue to a session recording, it's not the only way to get there. Consider creating a ticket template that encourages employees to submit as much of the following information as possible:
- The date and time the issue occurred
- The user's browser and operating system
- The URL on which the issue occurred
- The last thing the user clicked before the issue occurred, if applicable
- The last funnel step the user made it to before their progress was blocked, if applicable
- A custom ID value. Many eCommerce companies use unique identifiers, like customerID or storeID, and you can adjust the script to track these values through the NoibuJS SDK.
Noibu can be a useful tool during several customer support processes, like Investigating a Poor Survey Score or Supporting Shoppers During a Code Freeze.