Customer satisfaction is everything in the fast-paced, competitive world of eCommerce. With options galore at the click of a mouse, today’s consumer has little patience for downtime, delays, poor service, and, perhaps worst of all, data breaches.
This is why successful retailers invest heavily in infrastructure, platforms, connectivity, and automation to attract clients and maintain high levels of satisfaction – not just in a broad sense, but on a deeply personal level.
Few organizations can do this on their own, however. Many are turning to specialists like CBTS to craft tailored solutions for their individual markets, business objectives, and legacy data environments.
One leading specialty clothing and accessories retailer with more than 1,000 stores in North America, China, and the U.K., and with clients in more than 80 countries around the world, turned to CBTS for an optimized eCommerce solution that delivers maximum performance and top-flight security.
The challenges were considerable. First, the company could not afford any downtime on its website. While its brick-and-mortar stores are the backbone of business operations, its web presence serves as the public face. Even a few minutes of downtime is enough to erode the trust of clients across the globe, especially during the holidays when the bulk of annual revenue is generated.
The company also had volumes of untouched IT operational data that it wanted to leverage for real-time decision making. As with many organizations, however, much of this data was housed in a silo-based infrastructure, which provided limited visibility to analytics or back-office operations systems.
And, to make matters worse, the high profile of the company’s brand made it a target for those seeking to exploit security vulnerabilities. Not only was it imperative to secure this data, the client needed a way to quickly respond to breaches and minimize potential damage.
CBTS began by deploying a Splunk-based operational intelligence and enterprise-grade security solution. The immediate goal was to quickly resolve system issues while also strengthening the company’s security posture.
Splunk is a multi-faceted platform that can perform a wide range of tasks; however, it requires high-level fine-tuning to provide optimal performance within an existing business model. CBTS Consulting Services provided on-site assistance with Splunk-certified consultants who have extensive experience integrating the platform into legacy environments in extremely tight timeframes.
Through this partnership, CBTS created a multi-point plan to improve business operations and overall business performance.
Today, the retailer has a robust operational intelligence solution that supports its IT staff by continuously monitoring network traffic and correlating data from the entire IT stack to quickly identify and neutralize intruders. This implementation not only finds security problems that other systems tend to overlook, it can also be used to diagnose a wide range of non-security issues that impair performance.
CBTS ultimately helped the retailer address a persistent performance problem that resulted in a 40 percent reduction in server load, which freed up bandwidth to allow Spunk to expand its capabilities.
This is a common experience: The more data sources Splunk is able to track, the more powerful it becomes. This project translated into an immediate ROI for the retailer, since it eliminated the need to purchase additional hardware, while improving eCommerce performance, boosting client satisfaction, protecting the company’s brand, and bringing greater functionality and accuracy when projecting revenue and cash flow.