Aleem Cummins, Release Manager with John Lewis, joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante inside theCUBE, during day two of the Splunk.conf13 in Las Vegas, describing how a huge UK department store with a major online presence benefits from using the data management platform.

Retail business is going through some massive transformations, noted Vellante, and Cummins provided the context: “When the company started some 150 years ago, it was all about customer experience, trust and the responsibility we have. What’s changed since then is how people buy from us. Back then we had the shop. Now we have shops, people can buy by the telephone, by the internet, and by the mobile.”

“Mobile is now a massive, massive part of our business,” detailed Cummins. “We have to adapt to that, we have to be ahead of the curve. It’s really an exciting place to be.”

Splunk implementation

 
“We started using [Splunk] some 18 months ago, going from proof-of-concept to an enterprise version. When we launched our new websites on Valentine’s Day this year, we had the opportunity to use Splunk in a really powerful way. It has been a game changer. Sometimes, to a degree, it kinda feels like a new game,” said Cummins.

Splunk has allowed John Lewis to solve some real problems, to the benefit of themselves as a business and to the benefit of their customers. In Cummins’ opinion, the customer’s experience has been improved by their use of Splunk.

“Have you seen more cost reduction problem solving or cost revenue generating?” asked Furrier. “A little bit of both,” replied Cummins. “We are solving problems we didn’t necessarily know that we had, and we’re able to get good intelligence about what our customers are doing. We can act accordingly, making sure that what we have in place is what they need to shop they way they want to shop.”

Surviving the competition

 
Vellante suspects customer experience is part of the secret of John Lewis’s longevity, but he wanted to talk about the competitive forces and about the skills required to adapt, survive and thrive in that context. “We have a very special position within the UK. We are highly trusted, we are loved by our customers. They tend to stick by us, and our customer service hasn’t changed in 150 years.”

“The logistic component, especially for the online piece, is really dramatically changing,” claimed Vellante. The trends are not “next day delivery” but “same day delivery” and even “Sunday delivery.”

“‘Click-and-pick’ has just exploded during the last few months. The fact that you can pick it up in the store the next day is huge. In terms of using Splunk for that, I’d like to think about it as a friendly, positive type of quicksand: it pulls stuff in and what comes out at the other end is gold.”