Operational intelligence provider Splunk has announced a partnership with retailer John Lewis to deliver operational and customer insight across the companys responsive website and app.

Originally selected to provide search and alert on John Lewis IT infrastructure, Splunk is now also being used by the retailer to provide digital intelligence through real-time analysis of data from its eCommerce platforms. Through this intelligence, John Lewis hopes to better understand purchasing trends, improve customer experiences and drive higher conversion rates.

The intelligence Splunk provides informs decisions made by everyone from the IT, web and marketing departments up to senior stakeholders of John Lewis. Splunks contributions over the Christmas 2013 period contributed to John Lewis online sales growing more than 23 per cent over the holiday period.

Aleem Cummins, release manager & Splunk lead at John Lewis, spoke about the power of real-time feedback in operational intelligence. “People are getting very passionate. We have a key project going on right now, and our Splunk team are able to sit down with our development team and as theyre clicking on interactions on the new project, we can see exactly what machine data is being generated there and then. Thats a wondrous thing – you can see cause and effect.”

“Theres a lot of things going on at John Lewis right now around this,” said Cummins. “Theres so many things happening, and Splunk is gluing some of that stuff together and allowing us to have synergy, so the things that we would have like to have done, theyre now easier to do.

“The benefits of really harnessing the data you have, fine-tuning the intelligence you have, can change how successfully projects can land. Its a very fast changing place were in at the moment, in omnichannel, so we need to be bringing things together. If we can use tools like Splunk to do that, it frees up people to do more thinking at the higher level.”

Splunk recently launched an app for their operational intelligence platform, enabling users to monitor and act upon the data they are receiving from smartphones and tablets. “The data that is generated by mobile is of extreme value to us,” said Cummins.