Yakima Chief Hops 
uses Fullstory to support lean teams 
and cut CX issue time-to-resolution 
in half

Yakima Chief Hops is a 100% grower-owned Washington-based supplier of hops for brewers across the globe. In 2020, Yakima Chief Hops supplied more than 40% of the total North American crop, officially becoming the largest hop supplier in North America. YCH sources from a network of more than 
50 family-owned farms that collaborate to grow the hops that YCH distributes. Yakima Chief Hops is also working toward carbon neutrality, and was recently named one of the greenest businesses with the largest solar array in Washington.


Yakima Chief Hops uses Fullstory to proactively identify defects and save resolution time for lean teams

Augment small teams with Fullstory data and analytics

Though Yakima Chief Hops is growing quickly, many of its teams are still too small to have highly specialized roles. The engineering team, for example, lacks full-time quality assurance or UI/UX team members. Like many expanding companies, Yakima Chief Hops turns to technologies like Fullstory to fill in the gaps. Before Fullstory, the engineering team thought that many reported issues were simply results of user error, but they didn’t know for sure–and they didn’t have anyone dedicated to researching this topic. With Fullstory, the team can watch user sessions to see where users struggle, measure frustration signals, and ensure the quality of their solutions.

Find and fix bugs before users report them

By proactively monitoring user sessions in order to identify bugs, YCH’s engineering team is able to solve user problems before they even happen. Fewer customer experience issues means fewer support tickets are filed, fewer customers churn because of frustrating experiences, and more time and money are saved across the board. The Yakima Chief Hops team estimates that they’ve been able to identify and fix about a third of their defects before they're ever reported by a customer, and they expect this number to climb with the recent introduction of Fullstory Dashboards.

Pinpoint causes of user issues without troublesome back-and-forth

Like many Fullstory customers, Yakima Chief Hops uses Fullstory to diagnose problems that users are having within their portal. In one such instance, a customer was repeatedly unable to make purchase selections, but the user portal wasn’t actually capturing any errors. Without Fullstory, an engineer would have needed to ask the support team to contact the customer, who would then need to join a video call and reproduce the error. However, by simply finding the user’s session in Fullstory, the YCH engineer was able to see that the user was accessing the site on an outdated, unsupported browser, which was causing the issue. By diagnosing and solving the problem in this way, the engineer was able to save their own time, as well as that of the support agent and the customer.