How Kurt Geiger prepares for sales season
Increased observability means more resilience
Kurt Geiger may predate the internet by several decades, but the fashion retailer now relies on e-commerce for up to 40% of its revenue through its portfolio of five websites.
Any business that engages its customers through e-commerce needs to ensure it has an excellent online presence. But for high-end retailers like Kurt Geiger, it's even more important that they offer a premium digital experience matching their customers' expectations.
That means ensuring its websites are fast and engaging, check out is frustration-free, and that the experience aligns with what customers would receive in-store. However, running five websites requires a complex infrastructure to ensure that they not only function, but they function well. This becomes increasingly difficult during the festive season, with traffic peaking as up to a third of shoppers expected to do their festive shopping solely online.
To manage this, Kurt Geiger developed a mature observability practice with New Relic that ensures it has complete visibility over its tech stack.
Addressing issues before they occur
A growing number of businesses are adopting observability as a practice. Teams can use full-stack observability to easily monitor systems, improving mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to repair (MTTR), or even pre-empting problems before they occur, all to ensure a frictionless customer experience.
Kurt Geiger uses New Relic to monitor the entirety of its websites, from customer behaviour all the way to the underlying infrastructure. As a result, it is fully aware of how well each page is working and has organised alerts reaching the granular level. For example, not only does New Relic show where customer drop-off points are, but it provides alerts if the email entry box isn't working or if particular buttons can't be clicked. The ultimate goal is to receive an alert that something is going to fail before an issue affects the customer - avoiding negative impact on the brand experience and preventing a sale being lost.
This understanding of the way their websites function is particularly important to Kurt Geiger during peak times. The retailer now runs two sales a year, the summer sale and the winter sale, but the end of the year heralds high levels of traffic for all e-commerce sites in preparation for the festive season.
Observability is a key part of how Kurt Geiger prepares for these periods, beginning with checks that all of its alerting is working properly. The IT teams then test the platform's different toggles and use New Relic to examine coverage gaps. This helps to cut out any disruptions to business that might otherwise occur when their websites are at peak traffic - such as unidentified issues with new systems or flaws from recent upgrades.
Furthering its use of observability
As Kurt Geiger and New Relic's relationship has evolved, the two companies have worked together to find further ways to help the retailer improve its infrastructure and enhance its websites. Kurt Geiger's IT teams rely on Google Core Web Vitals (CWV) to improve its websites' Google rankings. With New Relic, they were able to make a dashboard to visualise the three key aspects of web user experience: loading, interactivity and visual stability, which helped them to understand how to make improvements to their websites. The real-time data allowed the operations team to work with management and marketing to introduce a series of changes that optimised CWV. Within six months, the company saw its CWV score jump from 50 to 90.
By developing a mature observability practice, Kurt Geiger has been able to deliver the same premium experience that its customers enjoy in-store, wherever they interact with the brand across its digital platforms.
Mark Crawford is a VP of Strategy and Execution at New Relic