John Lewis improves customer experience with 'game changer' Splunk

Johnlewis.com release manager Aleem Cummins on how big data solution allows the firm to dream big

John Lewis took advantage of its deployment of Splunk's big data solution when a new web platform launched earlier this year, with Aleem Cummins, release manager for johnlewis.com, going so far as to call it "a game changer".

"It allows us to dream and we haven't really had that before because we can do pretty much anything with Splunk," he told Computing during an interview at Splunk Worldwide Users' Conference 2013 in Las Vegas.

Cummins explained how through the deployment of Splunk, John Lewis was able to solve a website issue that accompanied the new platform launch, which was costing the firm business as users experienced problems when ordering online.

"When you have a new platform it can happen that there might be things that aren't quite perfect," he said.

"We had a key situation where we had a very small issue with online store checkout [which didn't work with certain browsers] which ultimately had a stronger impact on revenue that it should have. It was a very peculiar situation in how it manifested itself."

However, John Lewis was able to use Splunk to display the behaviour of website users, allowing staff to pinpoint the issue, which ultimately led to the problem being resolved, something that would have been more difficult without the tools.

"Traditionally it would've been really hard to diagnose that because we couldn't really recreate it, and when you can't recreate a problem it's really difficult to solve it. So what Splunk does really well for us is it gives us behaviour and we can also examine inferred behaviour from that."

Data analysis showed that there were issues with certain browsers, with John Lewis able to recreate the problems in order to solve them, allowing customers to once again go about the business of shopping online. Cummins told Computing how this single event justified the investment in Splunk.

"That one incident covered our expenditure on Splunk, so the return on investment we've had has been fantastic, phenomenal since we put Splunk in," he said, adding that there will be more chances for the firm to obtain value from it in future.

"But there'll be more opportunities that'll manifest themselves as we dream up ways of making it better for our customers," he said.

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John Lewis improves customer experience with 'game changer' Splunk

Johnlewis.com release manager Aleem Cummins on how big data solution allows the firm to dream big

According to Cummins, Splunk has also improved collaboration across John Lewis.

"One of the beauties of Splunk for us is that it fosters collaboration, because is Splunk a thing for IT, analytics, or marketing? It's a bit of all three," he said.

"I can do stuff now that before only our web analytics people would do. That gives me the opportunity to collaborate with the web analytics guys and make something better. The more teams we can get on board, the more we can grow," Cummins continued.

"It's great to have the one view panel and when we can use Splunk to visualise that one view that's a game-changer because we have dashboards where you can see where you're at at all times with reassurance."

Cummins suggested that the amount of data available to analyse is only going to rise in future, so John Lewis needs to make sure it's able to deploy Splunk to other staff, or use it for other parts of the business, as and when required.

"That's the thing, there is an exponential curve but the thing we need to make sure we do really well is manage the expectation curve which is pretty exponential as well, so we're being sensible in terms of how we roll it out," he said.

For John Lewis, Splunk has taken away a "fear of failure" that previously held the firm back, Cummins explained.

"Splunk allows people to dream. When we were children we dreamed but when we become adults a fear of failure can kick in," he said, adding it also saves time and removes stress.

"Splunk takes that away because we can dream about what we can do and the stress goes as well. We can now go straight in to find the root causes rather than bringing people together to figure out what could be wrong," said Cummins.

He added that Splunk was "like self-service" enabling it to be available to staff at any time, which ultimately means a better experience for John Lewis' online customers.

"It's high quality self-service, we can get on with what we need to do whenever we want wherever we want, with all of that benefiting our customers," he concluded.