Using Quanta, 24 Sèvres Aligns Web Performance with Business Performance

Luxury fashion and beauty retailer uses Quanta to enable better collaboration across its business and technical teams.

In Pursuit of Shopping Excellence

Located at 24 rue Sèvres in Paris, Le Bon Marché has been the first modern department store since its foundation in 1852. Its online retail hub, 24sevres.com, is the digital extension of the same luxury fashion and beauty shopping experience provided by Le Bon Marché’s physical stores.

Historically, the luxury experience had occurred solely in stores, but the advent of digital changed everything, including luxury shopping habits.

Today’s shoppers start and continue their buying journey anywhere at anytime, whether on the web, on mobile or at points of sale. As such, 24 Sèvres has realized the importance of mastering the digital experience as part of a unified whole.

“In luxury retail, the experience is everything,” explains Olivier Conq, CIO of 24 Sèvres. “The brands we represent have rich histories often going back hundreds of years. The digital experience that we offer must do justice to their exacting standards. Our customers expect nothing less!”

A Need to Improve Technical and Business Performance Together

“I joined 24 Sèvres to lay the technical foundations of the platform and to ensure a successful launch,” says Conq. “But more than simply picking the best solutions and hiring the best talent, my ongoing day-to-day role is to make sure our teams are working together and taking care of the right things at the right time.”

Today, web performance is the foundation of the company’s success. Any slowdowns affect the user experience and immediately impact conversions. Therefore, 24 Sèvres has teams in place specializing in Web Analytics, User Analytics, Network Supervision, and Application Performance Management tools.

The company has quickly realized that despite being able to measure speed, SLAs, uptime and slowdowns at the level of each stakeholder, what they had before was unsatisfactory and efforts occurred in silos.

Choosing Quanta

24 Sèvres had to manage web performance continuously across the whole team, which needed to bring analytics together, correlate technical performance with business results, and to enable technical and business users to speak the same language.

24 Sèvres selected Quanta for its unique ability to:

• Automatically and continuously monitor multiple conversion paths in addition to responsiveness.
• Correlate performance with revenue for each simulated path, browser or device,
• Provide unified analytics designed for both business and technical users,
• Enable root cause analytics and to prioritize effort in terms of revenue impact.

Improved Insight and Collaboration

“Out of the box we get a unified history of all the configuration changes we are making to the platform and a single view of how everything is performing from a real-life user standpoint,” said Conq.

The hosting provider, front-end teams, back-end teams, and business users now have a single point of truth to understand each other better. In particular, Quanta provides facts and figures that are clear enough for non-technical users and can be shown directly in management meetings.

However, the value goes far beyond the ability to monitor everything happening. Quanta gives 24 Sèvres the ability to better communicate across teams and prioritize efforts based on an objective view of revenue impact.

Peace of Mind and Protected Revenue

24 Sèvres worked with Quanta eight months ahead of the full-scale launch. At the time, the company was offering the platform to a limited audience. Quanta’s professional services played an active advisory role and staged load tests to make sure 24 Sèvres would be able to handle peak traffic.

“Integrating Quanta went smoothly and doing business with them has been a pleasure,” says Conq. “We had built a number of proprietary security measures into our platform. At that time, I thought we would have to go back to the drawing board to accommodate Quanta. However, to my surprise, Quanta was able to make all the necessary changes on their side in less than 48 hours, which took a huge strain off us.”

Some time after the official launch, 24 Sèvres experienced a production incident that went undetected by all tools except for Quanta, which noticed and immediately alerted the company’s teams. Because of this, 24 Sèvres was able to fix in less than 30 minutes what would otherwise have gone unnoticed for several hours and, in the end, protected a substantial amount of incremental revenue.

Faster Sales, No Finger-Pointing

Quanta is the primary tool for ensuring and managing web performance for 24 Sèvres, whose teams now have visibility and control of a mission-critical aspect of their e-commerce operations.

Fundamentally, Quanta enables 24 Sèvres to optimize their web performance and solve problems easier. Their teams are much more agile, the impact of everybody’s work is clearer and there is no longer any finger-pointing.

“The shopper experience is reliably faster,” said Conq. “We can demonstrate real ROI both in terms of top-line revenue and in terms of effort saved.”

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