Key Challenges
PUMA lacked insight into customer orders on its e-commerce websites, which led to poor customer experience and missed sales opportunities.
Key Results
With Splunk Cloud Platform, PUMA now monitors events as they happen, performs quick investigations and rectifies problems before they prevent customers from making purchases online.
Because global sports and apparel brand PUMA’s previous systems couldn’t detect customer order problems on its 45 e-commerce sites, the company was losing tens of thousands of dollars in missed sales every hour. Each time a customer’s purchase failed, it also damaged the brand’s reputation and customer loyalty that PUMA has earned since its founding in 1948.
PUMA turned to Splunk for a solution. Using Splunk Cloud Platform and the AIOPS Monitoring solution from partner AIOPSGROUP, the company reduced the average time to detect issues from hours to minutes, and gained the insights it needed to fix problems and ensure a smooth buying experience for its online customers.
Before using Splunk, PUMA’s basic monitoring capabilities could only indicate whether its e-commerce sites were up or down. This meant DevOps and business teams couldn’t detect critical issues that caused failed orders, such as unresponsive inventory systems or declined credit cards. The result was a significant number of missed sales opportunities.
Michael Gaskin, senior DevOps manager for global e-commerce at PUMA, had used Splunk at a previous job — and knew it could help. “If we could get our order information from Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which was running on our web server, into Splunk, we could set up automatic alerts about conditions that impacted customer orders and revenue,” he says.
Gaskin found a solution with Splunk partner and e-commerce consultant AIOPSGROUP. The partner’s AIOPS Monitoring solution collects data from Salesforce Commerce Cloud and ingests it into Splunk Cloud Platform, where it can be analyzed and presented in dashboards and alerts.
Now, PUMA teams have access to metrics on both failed sessions and failed orders. They know whether something is an isolated issue that affects only one customer or if it’s a widespread issue that will significantly impact revenue. “We’ve decreased our average time to detect issues to 15 minutes with AIOPSGROUP and Splunk, compared to hours previously,” says Gaskin. “And because we also know exactly where the issue lies, we can escalate and fix the issue quickly and effectively.”
We’ve decreased our average time to detect issues to 15 minutes with AIOPS and Splunk, compared to hours previously. And because we also know exactly where the issue lies, we can escalate and fix the issue quickly and effectively.
When it comes to identifying and fixing problems with customer orders, we’ve taken a huge step forward using Splunk. Orders are the lifeblood of an e-commerce business, and our highest priority is ensuring that they keep flowing in.
Splunk saves PUMA time and makes it money. Since its busiest regions earn tens of thousands of dollars in sales per hour on their e-commerce sites, any delay in detecting and fixing order failures quickly adds up.
An unresponsive inventory system, for example, cost PUMA $108,000 in lost sales when it prevented customers from making purchases. The system is queried as part of each order to ensure available stock. When it failed, it cost PUMA both revenue and hard-earned customer goodwill.
“Now, with Splunk, we would see right away what's causing that inventory issue, and we could fix the problem so customers could continue to buy merchandise,” says Gaskin. “Before using Splunk, we had no visibility into our e-commerce activity at this granular level. We had to wait until a customer or someone on our content team noticed it and complained about it. By that time, we’d already lost money and frustrated customers.”
When customers have poor experiences buying on PUMA.com, it makes them less likely to return and buy from the brand again. Being able to ensure customers have a seamless online buying experience with Splunk means PUMA can build long-term customer satisfaction and increase brand loyalty.
We also have a large community of third-party developers. Using Splunk means they and our business users have the right tools to work together effectively.
Teams across PUMA benefit from using Splunk Cloud Platform and AIOPSGROUP. Because of Splunk’s easy-to-use interface and dashboards, business users in PUMA’s 20 regional e-commerce teams can immediately see when their sites have issues without having to contact IT. The more eyes watching site performance, the quicker any issues can be corrected.
“We also have a large community of third-party developers. Using Splunk means they and our business users have the right tools to work effectively,” says Gaskin. PUMA’s business team in India, for example, once noticed a spike in order value that, when investigated, revealed an issue with failed transactions using a certain payment method. Because the team caught the issue with Splunk, it managed those orders before customers were affected.
PUMA is now working to push data on customer actions into Splunk in real time. Currently there’s about a 10-minute delay for viewing site activity. Gaskin believes that this can be improved, allowing an even more timely view of customer issues.
“When it comes to identifying and fixing problems with customer orders, we’ve taken a huge step forward using Splunk,” says Gaskin. “Orders are the lifeblood of an e-commerce business, and our highest priority is ensuring that they keep flowing in.”
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