Smarter Monitoring, Happier Customers In the world of SaaS, keeping customers happy means ensuring your software runs smoothly—at every step, every time. That’s exactly why leading provider of business software, The Access Group, relies on thinkTRIBE to ensure seamless SaaS performance and customer satisfaction. Nowhere is this more vital than in their Care Division, where software reliability directly impacts lives. The Challenges Managing CX at scale Understanding Real-World User Experience:  Highly customisable solutions made it difficult to assess true customer impact. Slow Incident Resolution:  Troubleshooting consumed valuable developer time, delaying fixes and reducing efficiency. Measuring CX Post-Release:  While backend changes were trackable, their effect on end-user experience was harder to gauge. The thinkTRIBE Solution thinkTRIBE’s DCX Intelligence Monitoring Service transformed The Access Group’s approach to CX management: 24/7 Real-User Journeys:  Simulating customer interactions provides an accurate CX benchmark. Fully Managed SaaS Monitoring:  Handling scripting, code maintenance, and proactive support frees up developer time. Multi-Tenant Environment Monitoring:  Highlights infrastructure-wide performance issues before they escalate. Seamless Integration:  Works across architectures and integrates with platforms like PagerDuty for incident response. When issues arise, thinkTRIBE’s Video Replay and Wallboard provide instant visibility, helping teams quickly verify, diagnose, and resolve problems. The Results 1. True CX Visibility & Data-Driven Improvements thinkTRIBE soon became a key tool in The Access Group’s CX strategy, providing an accurate, real-world view of performance. As Ovidiu Julean, Director of Products & Engineering – Care, explains: "thinkTRIBE is the final validation point—if it’s down for thinkTRIBE, it’s down for our customers. It’s the source of truth, accurately reflecting real-user experience." 2. Faster Issue Resolution & Happier Customers Early Warning System:  Detects slowdowns before they escalate into errors. Quick Diagnosis:  Identifies issues, providing video replay and evidence for faster resolution. Clear insight into customer-reported issues  to determine if external factors are at play. "Faster issue resolution leads to happier customers. My goal is to minimise engineering time spent diagnosing problems so we can fix them quickly." 3. Enhanced Developer Productivity With thinkTRIBE, engineers spend less time troubleshooting and more time building new features: "We’ve dramatically improved CX—customer journeys are faster, and performance metrics are greener. Monitoring helps us resolve issues faster." 4. Driving Retention & Protecting Revenue thinkTRIBE enables The Access Group to deliver seamless experiences, improving customer satisfaction and retention, ultimately protecting gross revenue retention (GRR). "thinkTRIBE provides the closest insight into real-user experience. The managed service model is a huge value-add, saving our team time while improving CX." Conclusion By integrating thinkTRIBE’s proactive CX and performance monitoring service, The Access Group has accelerated issue resolution, boosted developer efficiency, and enhanced SaaS CX. The result? More satisfied customers, streamlined operations, and long-term business success. Read the full case study here or 'earn more about how our DCX Intelligence Service can help maximise your SaaS CX .

Elevate eCommerce CX & boost Black Friday conversions Black Friday is just around the corner, and with the peak sales period now stretching over a longer period, many deals are set to go live as early as October. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Holiday Season present huge opportunities for eCommerce businesses but failing to prepare adequately can result in lost revenue and long-term damage to your brand’s reputation. The good news is that it’s not too late – by testing now and focusing on delivering optimal Digital CX around the clock, there’s still time to boost conversion rates and prevent lost revenue during this peak holiday period. Seven-Step Plan for Holiday Peak Season Success Follow these steps to eliminate DCX friction and website errors, and maximise online revenue this peak holiday period. 1. Integrate Load Testing Early The earlier you incorporate Load Testing into your holiday season planning process, the better. Many businesses mistakenly leave load testing as a last-minute task, but a more proactive approach ensures you can resolve issues without last-minute pressure. Retesting after fixes is essential for success. 2. Define Realistic Testing Targets Before diving into testing, define what success looks like based on real-world customer experiences. Understand how users interact with your site and build your tests around that knowledge. Use data from past performance to develop realistic test models that simulate actual customer journeys, from landing pages to promotions and checkout – including realistic mixes of journeys and drop-off ratios. 3. Measure Current Capacity Assess your site’s current capacity to handle traffic. Look at how your site performed in previous peak periods, including journey delivery times and error rates. If you plan to launch a stripped-down version of your site for Black Friday, Load Test that version in isolation to understand its performance limits. 4. Test Often We recommend Load Testing months ahead of peak season and using the results to establish a baseline and to identify areas for improvement. Regular testing, with increased frequency leading up to the final code lockdown, will help you make incremental changes and verify improvements. 5. Lockdown Code on Time Start your code lockdown at least six weeks before peak to ensure stability. This timeline allows you to implement final changes, such as Black Friday sections and deal codes, before freezing the code. Consider reducing non-essential functionality to optimise performance and ensure a smooth experience for mobile users. 6. Retest After Code Freeze Two to four weeks before peak season, retest your live system to ensure the final environment is performing as expected. Testing in a staging environment is not enough; real-world performance on the live system is critical for success. 7. Focus on ongoing Customer Experience 24/7 After all the preparation, ensure that your customers continue experiencing a seamless journey from landing page to checkout. Gathering Digital CX Intelligence for key journeys 24/7— especially on mobile — will help you catch any issues before they impact users. Test your site using real-world scenarios to avoid unexpected problems with real browsers and on genuine OS. With this plan in place, you can confidently approach the holiday season, ensuring your eCommerce store is ready to deliver an exceptional Digital Customer Experience, prevent lost revenue and safeguard your brand. Free up staff resources with an extension to your team In reality you probably don’t have the resources, time or capacity to plan, prepare and test for seasonal peaks. A fully-managed service offers the benefits of experienced test experts acting as an extension of your technical team. This expands your resource, time, experience and not to mention test capacity – as and when you require it – and frees up internal teams to focus on business objectives. For a more detailed guide on the seven step process download our eBook here. #digitalexperience #DXfriction #DXmonitoring

We live in a world where the majority of us have a mobile phone almost permanently glued to our hand! We use our mobile phones for pretty much every part of our lives; photos, organising our time, emails, appointments, accessing the internet for checking in with friends and family, researching, booking, watching, listening…the list is never ending!  So it comes as no surprise that in 2022 the UK has seen over 70% of online retail traffic come from mobile users, making them your most immediate customers.  With such a high demand for mobile compatible sites, it’s never been more important to ensure your site is mobile ready…because these customers take no prisoners! It’s time for CX Mobile Monitoring! The 3 second rule – this is the estimated time mobile users will take to lose interest in your site. If products, sharing, adding to basket, or payment pages take longer than 3 seconds to load, they’re off to another site, and you’ve lost your sale and your customer.  By engaging with mobile monitoring, you can test your site’s ability to cope with an array of customer journeys, discover any loading issues and highlight glitches before your mobile customers experience them. Mobile users are your most immediate customers as sites and apps are so easily and readily accessed. Delivering a flawless and seamless experience is paramount to ensure your site is a success on every mobile device, no matter how many people are visiting or what action they are trying to perform.  Can you really afford to lose out on the 70% of online shopping by mobile users by not performing mobile monitoring and testing to ensure your site provides the best mobile CX? If you need help testing your site or app with mobile monitoring, why not get in touch with us here at thinkTRIBE .

For any football club, unveiling a new kit marks a significant milestone in the calendar. But amidst the excitement of the launch, how can you ensure that visitors can seamlessly checkout with their coveted new gear? At ThinkTribe, we’re lucky enough to work with some of the Premier League’s most prominent clubs, offering uniquely realistic load testing and dedicated client support to ensure flawless customer experience, even during peak times. Delivering a fast and error-free checkout experience is vital, especially during high-profile events like kit launches. So, how can you elevate your CX when it matters most? To ensure your site can handle high volumes of traffic and concurrent user transactions, accurate customer experience insights under real-world conditions are essential. Here are our top three tips to ensure you’ll be ready to handle the influx of eager fans without a hitch. 1) Prioritise preparation with sufficient time Based on our experience it’s more effective to implement a comprehensive load testing program as part of a planned process in the run up to kit launch. While it may not always be feasible, at the very least aim to conduct load testing prior to code lockdown, allowing enough time to implement, test and fix any issues. It’s important to allow margin for retesting to ensure fixes have worked and evaluate their impact on CX. We recommend testing key journeys at least four weeks ahead of kit launch to evaluate performance of the final system on the live environment. It’s often more costly to make changes at the last minute. 2) Base testing on realistic traffic profiles For the most accurate results, it’s crucial to base your testing on the most realistic traffic profiles . If you’re working with a load testing provider, they should analyse your web analytics and examine historical marketing data to ensure traffic profiles accurately reflect real-world scenarios. 3) Monitor CX around the clock Even minor changes to your site can impact customer experience. To prevent abandonment and ensure a seamless checkout process, continuously monitor key checkout journeys before and during the kit launch. Identifying and resolving issues before they impact your customers is key. If you’re ready to elevate your online customer experience during kit launch find out how thinkTribe can help support your goals. For a more comprehensive guide to maximising online sales at kit launch, download our eBook ‘Preparing your website for kit kaunch success’ . #kitlaunch #peakpreparation

Are you overlooking the hidden obstacles impacting digital experience (DX) and leading to lost sales? Beneath the surface of your digital platform lies a wealth of hidden DX friction, stealthily disrupting your customers’ online journeys. While these obstacles may remain hidden from your view, they have a tangible effect on your conversions. And while they elude conventional monitoring tools and error logs, their impact is keenly felt by your customers, leading to abandonment and lost sales We share our experience of the primary causes of concealed digital CX friction, so you can begin to tackle them and safeguard your bottom line. Understanding Business Logic Challenges Business logic issues serve as a primary source of hidden DX friction, creating frustration and hindering the checkout process for customers. These issues often arise from mishandled product information management (PIM), including complexities in product options, combinations, and stock management. Addressing these issues typically falls within the domain of business teams, so your tech teams are unable to rectify them. Conventional error detection methods fail to identify these issues, leaving customers to navigate through obstacles such as missing prices or unresponsive add-to-cart buttons. The result? Missed sales opportunities and dissatisfied customers. Navigating Intermittent Slowdowns Intermittent slowdowns steadily chip away at conversions and contribute to abandonment rates, yet they often go unnoticed within your online store. These slowdowns stem from complex interactions between underlying technological components and various plugins and tools. Their sporadic nature makes them difficult to pinpoint, manifesting in specific areas of your website, products or baskets or at specific times. Customers encounter these slowdowns while browsing or making purchases, having a direct impact on abandonment. However, traditional monitoring tools may not detect these issues, leaving businesses to grapple with an invisible challenge. Addressing Technical Errors Technical glitches pose a significant barrier to seamless checkout experiences, frustrating customers and eroding trust in your brand. Technical errors can result from bugs in your software or platform, compatibility conflicts, or issues with third-party tools and plugins. These errors manifest as unresponsive buttons, obscured checkout pathways, or confusing error messages. From bugs in your software or platform and compatibility conflicts to issues with third-party tools and plugins, technical errors arise from the complexity of your digital infrastructure. These errors manifest as unresponsive buttons, obscured checkout pathways, or confusing error messages. Such errors disrupt various aspects of your online store, impacting customer journeys and undermining confidence in your platform. Their sporadic occurrence makes them challenging to detect and address effectively. Revealing and Resolving Hidden DX Friction Addressing digital friction requires a shift in DX visibility and monitoring strategies, one that adopts a customer-centric approach and prioritises real-world interactions , on real browsers and using genuine operating systems. Only by interacting with your website as real customers do, and performing the same actions, can you identify and overcome the obstacles leading to abandonment and lost sales. In the dynamic world of digital commerce, the pursuit of frictionless customer experience is ongoing. Are you ready to take steps to mitigate hidden CX friction and reduce abandonment? To learn more about the hidden causes of friction and how to tackle them, read our eBook ‘Uncovering the hidden causes of digital CX friction’. #customerexperience #cxfriction #cxmonitoring

In the fast-paced world of online beauty retail, embracing innovation has always been essential. Technologies like Virtual Reality and AI-driven personalization have fuelled growth, offering immersive experiences and building brand loyalty. While innovation promises enhanced DX and higher conversion rates, increasing the complexity of your digital infrastructure can inadvertently disrupt the digital customer experience, leading to lost sales and brand damage. How technological innovation can undermine Digital Experience (DX) Unbuyable products, unexpected slowdowns, missing prices and images, and checkout errors—each innovation and its interaction with other functionality can introduce friction and drive customers away. Many of these issues are intermittent or occur under specific circumstances, making them difficult to detect. And despite the built-in tools and plugins offered by many digital commerce platforms, smooth implementation isn’t guaranteed, and frictionless DX can remain elusive. Key challenges for online beauty retailers We take a look at some key challenges in beauty digital commerce that could increase DX risk. 1. Immersive, Personalised Experiences Use of AI-driven hyper-personalization and AR/VR provides tailored and immersive experiences. However integration of these tools, compatibility conflicts and interaction with third-parties can exacerbate DX friction, resulting in unbuyable products and unexpected slowdowns. 2. Social Selling & Influencer Partnerships Leveraging social influence and brand communities helps reach new audiences, but integrating third-party or built-in influencer and social selling apps can introduce DX friction including checkout errors and technical glitches. 3. Customer Loyalty programs & subscriptions Implementing loyalty programs and product recommendations involves analysing past purchases and predictive modelling. DX risk comes from configuring these tools and managing product options, combinations, and promotions. Business logic issues can lead to missing product information and stock management problems leading to unbuyable products. 4. Incorporating Social Awareness Addressing socially conscious purchasing including clean beauty, environmental impact, and diversity is critical for beauty buyers. However, showcasing user-generated content and recommended products to support these values introduces new risks to DX. 5. Streamlining the checkout process Providing multiple payment and checkout options have all been shown to increase conversions. Implementation of these options adds a layer of complexity, which, if left unchecked, can result in technical glitches and checkout errors such as obscured checkout pathways and unresponsive buttons. With so many priorities and limited staff resources, how can you address DX friction that could be hurting your conversions? Embrace innovation but remain vigilant DX obstacles remain undetected by conventional tools and error logs and arise unexpectedly – on specific products, baskets or at particular times – making them difficult to detect and address. Real-world DX monitoring is key to identifying and resolving issues before they impact your customers. Performing the same tasks on the same real browsers, native apps, and operating systems as your customers, 24/7, reveals barriers to conversion on your site. And you can save time getting to the bottom of root causes with hard evidence across teams, video replay of issues and fast drill-down to granular data. Plus a service-based solution frees up valuable staff resources to focus on developing your store in line with business objectives. Online beauty retailers must embrace innovation but need to remain vigilant, by monitoring DX 24/7 to ensure a frictionless shopping experience, reduce abandonment, and protect their brand. Learn more about the DX friction that may be hidden from your view and how it impacts conversion rates in our eBook ‘The hidden causes of DX friction’.

In the dynamic world of football eCommerce, digital transformation is revolutionising the way fans interact with their favourite clubs. Today, fans seek engagement beyond the 90-minute matches, craving year-round, seamless Digital Experiences. At thinkTRIBE, we work with Premier League football clubs, providing unparalleled DCX Intelligence. We uncover DCX friction and lost sales and deliver the most accurate DCX insights prior to peak and before and after new feature integrations. From kit launches to online ticket sales and entering new global markets – how can you ensure seamless Digital Customer Experience (DCX) and optimise football eCommerce? Enhancing eCommerce profitability through superior Digital CX With ticketing now primarily digital and online merchandise and kit sales becoming a cornerstone of the industry, football clubs must deliver fast, seamless DCX across online stores to enhance profitability. Complex business logic behind ticketing options, membership and loyalty programmes plus kit customisation are a few aspects of Football eCommerce that can introduce DCX friction. Managing exclusive periods, priority points and purchase windows can result in errors such as missing ticket options, missing or incorrect pricing and promotion errors that you may not even be aware of. Football clubs face several challenges with their websites and mobile applications, all posing significant risks to DCX: Coping with traffic peaks Managing inventory and complex loyalty programmes Servicing an increasingly international audience Delivering online kit customisation options Bringing eCommerce in-house Visibility and accountability of third-parties such as autoscaling and payment providers Managing Traffic Peaks planned and unexpected Compared with many industries, we see Football Club peaks are much higher compared to baseline traffic, often resulting in scalability issues – even with autoscaling solutions in place! Managing traffic peaks is challenging, whether anticipated for kit launches, hype drops and streaming of pre-season games or unexpected due to tournament finals, major championship wins, or new signings. For peace of mind that critical routes fans take across your site will manage high volumes of traffic and concurrent user transactions, when it matters most, you need the most accurate Digital CX insights under real-world conditions. Mitigating the risk following site redesign or new features Site redesigns and new features, from kit customisation to new payment functionality, pose a risk to Digital CX and your bottom line. Full Visibility of any Digital CX issues that may be introduced following site changes is essential. Simulating real users interacting with your site at capacity and around the clock, helps uncover user friction swiftly, allowing you to fix issues before they impact your fans and your conversions. The Future of Football eCommerce Optimising Digital CX across new international markets Expansion into international markets has opened up new revenue streams for Football Clubs. However, global retail success requires a seamless international customer experience equivalent to that at home. 24/7 Visibility of all customer-impacting friction is crucial, regardless of country, region or language – including issues arising from multi-currency pricing, CDNs to caching and global transactions. Bringing Football eCommerce in-house The growth of football commerce presents an opportunity for clubs to channel their brands into global eCommerce platforms. Traditionally Football eCommerce operations have been outsourced, but this comes at a financial cost and at the risk of impacting loyalty, by relying on third parties to manage fans’ experience. Whether bringing your eCommerce operation in-house, entering new global markets or adding new functionality such as advanced kit customisation how can you mitigate the risks to Digital CX, your sales and ultimately your brand? Real-world DCX Intelligence mitigates risks to DCX, profit and brand Realistic Load Testing Services are critical for the most accurate DCX insights and to safeguard your brand, during peak periods, site changes or when bringing eCommerce operations in-house. Ongoing 24/7 DCX Visibility is vital to uncover friction and ensure you maintain seamless DCX, maximising conversions around the clock. At thinkTRIBE, we help Premier League Clubs achieve online retail success by helping them deliver superior Digital Customer Experiences. Enabling them to optimise DCX, reduce abandonment and protect brands. By partnering with thinkTRIBE, Football Clubs can not only meet but exceed fan expectations both at peak and 24/7. Let us help you transform your DCX and provide the world-class, fan-centred experience your supporters deserve. Learn more about thinkTRIBE or download our eBook Preparing for Kit Launch Success .

Managing SaaS platforms means balancing customer expectations, platform availability, and fast-paced development cycles, all while optimising developer time for maximum efficiency. Constantly delivering an exceptional customer experience (CX) and maintaining seamless performance are essential. Downtime, slow response times, or bugs in key user journeys directly impact customer trust, satisfaction and Gross Revenue Retention (GRR). To address these challenges, it’s vital to have true, end-to-end visibility of how your platform performs for users 24/7 . We explore some of the key challenges impacting digital CX, customer retention, and GRR for SaaS businesses - and how to overcome them. Challenge 1: True visibility of CX & end-to-end availability Many SaaS providers rely on limited insights from traditional monitoring tools that focus on uptime and technical metrics but fail to account for the real-world customer experience. These solutions often overlook issues that actual users encounter, such as navigation bugs, inconsistent speed or availability across user journeys and errors triggered by specific user actions or particular scenarios. This can leave teams blindsided by complaints or churn, especially when issues only appear under specific circumstances. True CX visibility goes beyond basic metrics to uncover the subtle, often-overlooked issues that impact user satisfaction, platform reliability and ultimately renewals. How real-world CX Intelligence monitoring elevates SaaS CX Real-world monitoring is an approach that replicates genuine user interactions on your SaaS platform 24/7. Utilising real browsers on genuine operating systems and gathering Intelligence into your platform's experience around the clock. This approach allows you to: Detect Complex Errors: Identify problems that don’t surface in conventional testing or monitoring. Understand CX Impact: See your platform through the eyes of your users, the true impact of CX issues leading to customer frustration. Resolve Issues Quickly: Use clear, actionable evidence, empowering the right team to resolve problems faster and more effectively. By catching these issues swiftly, software businesses can ensure a seamless user experience and build long-term customer loyalty. Challenge 2: Reducing the burden on development teams Another common challenge in maintaining SaaS platforms is the heavy reliance on development resources for monitoring and troubleshooting. A managed monitoring service can alleviate this burden by: Scripting User Journeys: No developer time required, scripting is carried out for you. Ongoing Journey Maintenance: Scripts are maintained to ensure journeys work throughout the development cycle. Faster, smarter error resolution: Video replay of CX issues plus evidence-based insights and alerting enable fast, informed fixes. A managed service approach is fast and easy to implement and use and frees up technical teams to concentrate on fixing bugs and platform improvements, rather than routine monitoring tasks. Challenge 3: Maximising customer retention Constantly maintaining high levels of CX to maximise customer satisfaction and reduce churn is critical. This requires ongoing understanding of your platform's CX and user behaviour whilst addressing pain points and performance issues, and delivering continuous improvements. Challenge 4: Mitigating the risk of rapid development cycles Continual updates, new features, and improvements can introduce bugs or cause instability if not carefully managed, creating a need for continuous testing and monitoring throughout development cycles. Significant business benefits for SaaS platforms SaaS companies using real-world monitoring see significant business outcomes, including: Improved platform stability & availability: Continuous testing uncovers issues early, reducing downtime and disruptions. Enhanced customer satisfaction: Smooth, error-free user journeys boost loyalty, increase renewals and reduce churn. Increased team efficiency: With minimal developer involvement, teams can address issues more efficiently and focus on platform development. Increased GRR & NPS: Happy customers mean higher renewals and greater revenue retention. Alex Jeffery, Cloud Engineering Director at The Access Group , explains how this approach benefits growing SaaS businesses: "The ability to maximise 24/7 CX and reduce time to bug detection, while boosting NPS scores and minimising staff resource needs, is a game changer for any SaaS platform." Key Takeaways Adopting a real-world monitoring strategy enables SaaS providers to: Maintain seamless CX: Maximise CX with minimal disruption for all customer touchpoints across user journeys. Save developer time: A fully managed service handles all the complexity to no tech headaches. Reduce time to error resolution: Video replay, hard evidence, alerting and data drill-down enable quick verification and fixing of errors. Protect GRR: Build trust and satisfaction with users, safeguarding revenue and retention rates. thinkTRIBE's DCX Intelligence Service delivers a true, end-to-end view of CX and platform performance 24/7, enabling SaaS businesses to remain agile and competitive whilst ensuring optimum CX and performance. By focusing on ongoing visibility and user-centric monitoring, you not only protect your platform’s reliability but also strengthen the foundation for long-term customer trust and success. What next? Download our top level intro to SaaS monitoring to share with your team. Discover how our DCX Intelligence service can help maximise CX for SaaS solutions with no developer time .

There comes a time in most websites’ lives, when the only option, in order to meet customer needs and technology demands, is to upgrade your website’s platform. Whether this be after upscaling within your current platform has reached its limit, or you’re wanting to achieve new goals not available on your existing platform, you need to make sure you’re fully prepared to have a seamless and as minimal damage migration as possible. Platform migration can create many opportunities for your business, but what are the risks? Downtime can be a serious problem – the longer your site is down, the longer you’re not making sales, the longer you give your customers to lose faith and search for their products elsewhere. If you don’t plan and carve out a sufficient amount of time to prepare, work on and test a site on a new platform, you are leaving yourself open to a number of glitches and bottlenecks, which you then won’t have time to rectify. This will lead to a poor customer experience when the site is live and could result in prolonged downtime. Loss of customers. This can be easily done when it can be so easily avoided. As discussed above downtime, glitches and bottlenecks can lead previously loyal customers to lose faith in a previously trusted site, or make new customers turn away instantly if achieving their goal takes too long, has too many hoops to jump through or they receive error messages at pivotal stages (such as payment). These issues can be overcome, and the risks to your business removed to achieve a smooth and positive platform migration – this is where thinkTRIBE’s FREE Ten Point Checklist will help: Audit your business processes – which parts of the old system need to be incorporated into the new one – how can processes be modified to make the most of the features of the new platform. Create goals – establish ways of measuring success or failure to better understand your ROI. Devise a timetable – ensure every department is aware of their involvement and goals for the migration and maintain regular meetings to ensure all are on track. Prioritise data and product migration – how will the new platform interface with your existing inventory. Sort out your SEO – ensure your optimisation is transferred appropriately and ensure enough time is allowed for this to be done properly. Allow time for training – Staff will need to get up to speed on the new platform, schedule this in at the beginning Test early and often – Assign a way of testing the new site before it is set live, when it goes live and then regularly to avoid glitches and bottlenecks. Keep your old site – run your old site in parallel until you’re 100% happy with your new site. Maintain customer communication – if any part of your customer service has changed, let them know. Monitor performance throughout – measure your KPIs on your old platform and then on your new, keep this maintained at regular intervals to ensure you can measure the impact of changes. For a more in depth step by step guide to maintain Customer Experience throughout your platform migration project download thinkTRIBE’s eBook!

Owning the customer experience all the way to order confirmation In online retail, checkout should be the most reliable and seamless part of the digital journey — the moment where customer intent turns into revenue. Yet for many brands, it’s also where the most invisible failures happen, silently disrupting conversions and eroding trust. The quiet cost of not knowing Retailers often come to us knowing there’s a problem with their site. They may be aware of traffic dropping off during checkout — but don’t know the cause or fully understand the impact on their eCommerce conversions. What they’re picking up on — whether through a dip in traffic or conversions, or a support ticket spike — is real, but they don't have enough information to quantify or troubleshoot the issues. Typical dashboards may show good availability and page load times. But customers are dropping off, and there's no clear error in sight. This is especially common on sites that rely on third-party systems integrators or managed eCommerce platforms, where technical ownership is shared — but responsibility for CX isn’t. The 3 blind spots most retailers face: Lack of error visibility Not all problems throw an error code. A failed API call or a third-party script timeout can cause customer friction without setting off alarms. Journey-level CX gaps Traditional monitoring or uptime checks don’t reflect the real customer journey. They miss more subtle yet damaging failures — such as a discount not applying at checkout, a payment option not appearing, or a postcode validation failing silently. Third party fog When eCommerce platforms or IT systems are managed by third parties, issues often fall into the grey area between teams. Without hard evidence, it’s difficult to escalate or resolve with confidence — and finger-pointing delays fixes. Why this matters more than ever In a competitive retail environment, friction at checkout is a silent revenue killer — and these failures often go unnoticed until someone reports them, or worse, walks away. Every missed transaction isn’t just lost revenue, it’s a lost relationship, a missed repeat sale, and a dent in customer trust. eCommerce conversion errors the path forward CX Visibility, not guesswork Retailers don’t need to guess anymore. A service replicating real user journeys around-the-clock — including add-to-basket, promotions, logins, checkout processes — gives teams hard evidence on where, why and how often issues cause drop-offs. Crucially, it enables: Faster identification of errors and anomalies Evidence to hold third parties accountable Smarter prioritisation of fixes based on actual customer impact Reduced time lost to internal troubleshooting and cross-team debates It’s not about blaming third parties. It’s about owning the customer experience — all the way to order confirmation. Real-world journey based CX Monitoring gives you the visibility standard tools miss, capturing how actual users experience your site, across all the steps that matter. With a true view of your digital journeys, you can pinpoint issues faster, hold third parties accountable, and protect your conversion rates where they’re most vulnerable. If you're ready to see what your customers are really experiencing, we can show you where the blind spots are — and how to fix them. Further Resources Read our Boden case study to learn how they use thinkTRIBE to maximise conversions and prevent lost sales globally Read our luxury retail Case Study to understand what happens when high-end eCommerce meets high traffic—and hidden API flaws Download our eBook and discover how to understand the causes of digital CX friction & website errors Learn how to eliminate eCommerce friction & website errors causing lost sales in our eBook

Why B2B eCommerce teams need to rethink visibility of CX Meeting B2B buyers B2C expectations In B2B eCommerce, the traditional focus has been on availability and functionality. If the site is up and orders are coming in, it's considered a success. But in today’s competitive landscape, that's no longer enough. 90% of global B2B buyers  expect a digital experience that reflects B2C. Journey speed, consistency, and ease of use have a direct and measurable impact on customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and long-term retention. The complexity of B2B customer journeys Unlike B2C, B2B customer journeys are rarely straightforward. They often involve account-specific pricing, tailored product ranges and complex trading terms. Add to this large order volumes and high frequency orders, and you have a digital environment that's far more vulnerable to - and less tolerant of - CX and performance issues. Standard monitoring tools that track uptime or server health don’t measure what the customer actually experiences. A page may technically load, but if it takes too long or fails to display a price or product details, it can prevent checkout. How Brakes approach CX measurement Brakes the UK’s leading food and drink wholesaler , recognised these challenges early. With 90% of their orders coming through digital channels, and over £1 billion flowing through their website annually, they knew that any CX disruption could impact both customer satisfaction and revenue. Brakes implemented real-world user journey CX monitoring to measure the performance of key customer routes—across real desktop and mobile browsers. This gave them visibility into what customers actually experience when performing tasks on the site, not just what their infrastructure says. It also leads to early detection of CX and performance issues so Brakes can act promptly to invoke the correct fix, minimising disruption and keeping customers happy. Key Lessons for B2B Teams Speed and consistency drive NPS and retention Brakes established a clear link: a 10% increase in journey speed led to a 4.4% improvement in NPS . And a better NPS is closely tied to stronger customer retention and reduced churn. Proactive detection matters Real-time alerts and journey monitoring let Brakes spot and fix issues before they escalated—often before customers noticed. Not all errors are equal Some issues, like missing prices or add-to-basket failures, directly impact revenue. Others, like a missing image, affect brand perception. Monitoring needs to reflect that and help teams prioritise accordingly. CX visibility from the end user perspective is essential Internal dashboards often miss issues rooted in front-end performance, third-party scripts, or customer-specific logic. Real-world user journey monitoring fills that gap by showing exactly what the user experiences. What should B2B eCommerce leaders do next? Measure real customer journeys not internal metrics or uptime. Review what your current monitoring actually measures. Does it deliver a true view of customer experience? Monitor with real browsers. Identify your most critical end-to-end digital journeys and monitor them continuously on the same browsers your end users are utilising. Unite team with unified metrics. Consolidate insights from IT, marketing, and customer service to build a shared view of digital experience. This helps align priorities and accelerates resolution. Quantify the business impact of CX. Start tying journey-level metrics to business KPIs like NPS, conversion, and churn and prioritise CX and performance accordingly. Final Thought Brakes' approach shows what’s possible when B2B organisations prioritise CX with the right tools and mindset. In a space where relationships, repeat business, and long-term trust are everything, digital performance isn’t just a tech issue—it’s a growth strategy. Brakes uses thinkTRIBE’s Digital CX Intelligence Monitoring to gain real-world visibility into performance, improve journey speed, and protect revenue through stronger customer experience. More Resources If you'd like to learn how leading food wholesaler Brakes utilised thinkTRIBE's CX monitoring to enhance CX and boos NPS, read our case study.

In most SaaS organisations, developer time is one of the most valuable and constrained resources.— yet engineering teams are still pulled into solving customer experience issues that could have been caught earlier. Often, it’s because real monitoring of end-to-end customer journeys isn’t happening. Most teams use traditional monitoring tools, track uptime, server performance, or errors — but that doesn’t reflect what users actually experience, and it doesn’t catch the kinds of issues that lead to complaints, frustration, or churn. In other cases, teams are using self-serve monitoring tools, but these still require developer time and lack full journey coverage. This post explores how SaaS teams can close the CX visibility gap without draining developer resources. The growing complexity of customer experience SaaS platforms operate in dynamic environments: constant releases, varied user behaviours, and increasingly complex integrations. The result? CX issues can surface at any time — often under specific user conditions that aren’t easy to reproduce in a dev or test environment. Many teams try to bridge this gap with traditional monitoring tools and custom scripts. But these often require developer input to create, maintain, and troubleshoot, especially when something breaks or when journeys change. Where the real time goes What starts as a few scripts quickly becomes a drain on resources: Maintaining journeys as the product evolves Triaging customer complaints with limited data Jumping between logs, front-end traces, and server metrics to identify root cause This type of work pulls developers away from roadmap delivery, technical innovation, and fixing CX issues. The gap between platform health and user experience Most teams have some form of monitoring in place: backend performance, service availability, maybe some synthetic checks or analytics dashboards. But those don’t reveal what a customer experiences when: A journey breaks halfway through A bug only appears on certain browsers A page slows down under specific conditions A release disrupts a critical conversion journey When that happens, the first sign is often a support ticket — or worse, silence followed by churn. When your developers get pulled in to investigate, the cost is twofold: customer trust has already taken a hit, and engineering time is now tied up in troubleshooting instead of delivering value. Rethinking who manages CX visibility So how can SaaS teams ensure a true view of CX without consuming engineering time? One answer is to treat CX and performance monitoring as a service — something that’s maintained externally or by dedicated specialists. This way, user journeys are tested continuously, across real-world conditions, and developers are only involved when something truly needs fixing — with the evidence and context to do it quickly. This shift: Reduces time spent on monitoring maintenance Speeds up issue resolution Frees developers to focus on product development Improves collaboration between support, ops and engineering Why it matters now In a competitive SaaS market, delivering a reliable, friction-free experience is closely tied to retention, NPS, and revenue. But keeping experience smooth shouldn’t come at the cost of slowing down your developers. As platforms grow more complex and teams scale, separating routine monitoring tasks from core development work becomes a smart operational decision. More Resources Ready to learn more about enhancing your SaaS CX whilst freeing developer time? Discover exactly how thinkTRIBE's managed CX solutions support growth for SaaS businesses . If you’re serious about delivering the best possible experience for your users while freeing developer resources, read about thinkTRIBE’s DCX Intelligence Service . If you'd like to learn how leading SaaS provider the Access Group utilised thinkTRIBE's CX monitoring to drive maximise CX and drive retention, read our case study.