At John Lewis, customer experience is more than just words; it’s a belief, and Splunk has helped us to better understand, and improve, the experience we offer our customers.
Operational Intelligence Supporting Online Growth at John Lewis Website
The John Lewis Partnership includes Waitrose supermarkets, a production unit and a farm, as well as John Lewis, the largest department store in the UK.
The company’s brand is synonymous with customer service and trust. John Lewis needed a solution that would give it operational visibility across its entire infrastructure, enable it to address issues before they could hurt the company's reputation for superior customer service and support rapid growth for its billion-pound website, johnlewis.com. Since deploying Splunk Enterprise, the company has seen benefits, including:
- Real-time operational insights
- Enhanced customer experience on the John Lewis website
- Prevention of revenue loss
Challenges
- Difficulty accessing and managing data across the enterprise
- Open source platform lacked stability and scalability needed to accommodate large and growing data volume
- Accessing data to make actionable decisions took up to weeks
- Developers lacked infrastructure visibility needed to ensure smooth application delivery
Business Impact
- Deployed in days and gained fast time to value
- Improving website uptime with real-time notifications
- Enhancing customer experience with real-time business insights
- Reducing business analytics from up to weeks to real time
- Quickly and reliably delivering application features to users
- Democratizing data access for technical and non-technical users
Why Splunk
Kris Wehner, vice president of engineering, Yelp Reservations, runs the company’s services related to restaurant reservations, including restaurant and diner-facing technology. According to Wehner, a primary challenge at Yelp prior to adopting Splunk Enterprise was that log data was nearly inaccessible to non-engineering staff, and even the engineers found it difficult to access. There was never enough engineering bandwidth to provide numbers and data to everyone who needed it to make business decisions, and getting accurate answers sometimes took weeks.
The company had experimented with different tools to manage its data including Elasticsearch as part of its open source strategy. “That effort stalled due to scale issues,” Wehner says. “We were having lots of problems pushing 10-plus terabytes of data per day into Elasticsearch clusters and having it remain stable. We’d have partial data availability, which made it really hard to rely upon as a single source of truth.”
When Wehner joined Yelp through an acquisition a few years ago he and his team introduced Splunk Enterprise to the engineering, product and business organizations. Next, the company moved forward with a proof of concept (POC) to show how the software could help Yelp succeed at a larger scale. “The Splunk POC demonstrated its capability to notify engineers if there was anything going on with the website in real time, which wasn’t possible before,” Wehner says. From there, the team deployed Splunk Enterprise in a matter of days and gained fast time to value.
Streamlined troubleshooting and application delivery for improved customer experience
Using Splunk Enterprise, John Lewis discovered that its customers' interactions with the new website were not necessarily linear. The team was able to provide insights to the business on how customers were actually navigating the site, enabling John Lewis to make changes that optimized search and have led to a more streamlined and user-friendly website.
Splunk software has enabled John Lewis to capture more revenue by monitoring drop-offs and payment failures, which can occur for a variety of reasons, ranging from fraud to incorrect credit card details. Now, whenever drop-offs are greater than a baseline figure, an alert triggered in Splunk Enterprise allows IT to rapidly investigate root cause.
Additionally, whenever John Lewis rolls out a new application or service, the team now monitors its health and performance using Splunk software. This helps foster even greater collaboration between IT and the business on creating cutting-edge dashboards to gain Operational Intelligence and continue to improve the customer experience.
Supporting rapid sales growth and tracking site performance
On Black Friday in 2013, John Lewis more than doubled its previous record for a single day's transactions on its website. The team used Splunk Enterprise to report on how core systems coped under the added pressure, incorporating this information into capacity planning for subsequent peak days.
During the Christmas 2013 clearance event, the busiest period of the year for John Lewis, Splunk Enterprise was a key component in the company delivering the best online performance in its history. Online sales grew 23 percent over the previous year’s holiday period. Splunk software helped inform important operational and marketing decisions in real time, such as when to promote and communicate certain items or campaigns, based on traffic to different areas of the site. John Lewis also used Splunk Enterprise to balance customer experience response times with the need to throttle website traffic, all in real time.
Our Splunk dashboards over the Christmas period were like looking at a NASA operations control center.
Improved operational visibility leads to superior customer experience
In summary, John Lewis is using Splunk Enterprise to gain improved Operational Intelligence and support rapid growth for its billion-pound website, johnlewis.com. The company can now quickly identify and resolve potentially costly issues and ensure that its website is delivering the best possible customer experience. By using Splunk software to analyze and dashboard a number of website metrics, John Lewis is also able to make key business decisions in real time to support its site during high-volume shopping events.
