Incidents caught before they reach customers

Figures are Splunk's published customer results. Attribute to Splunk and the named customers, and confirm current figures before publishing.  

It is one thing to resolve incidents quickly. It is another to stop them happening at all. That is the shift the best retail technology teams are making, and it is worth seeing what it looks like in practice.  

Specsavers, one of the UK's most recognisable retail names, uses Splunk to bring its operational data into a single, connected view. The results the team reports are not about dashboards, they are about outcomes. In a single month, the business prevented more than 100 critical and 500 major incidents, and it saves in the region of 25,000 hours a month through automation. As Andy Slater, the company's Observability and Automation Lead, puts it, Splunk has made every team's life easier.  

The number that should catch a retailer's eye is not the hours saved, welcome as they are. It is the incidents prevented. Prevention is what becomes possible when you can see across the whole estate and spot the pattern that precedes a failure, rather than waiting for the failure to announce itself through a customer complaint.  

The pattern repeats across sectors. Rent the Runway cut its mean time to resolve by 94% and prevented unplanned downtime, protecting the customer experience its business depends on. Travelport reduced false positives by 95%, which is another way of saying its teams stopped chasing noise and started trusting their alerts.  

What these organisations have in common is not a particular tool feature. It is a decision to stop treating visibility as a collection of separate monitoring screens and to start treating it as one connected view of the journeys customers rely on. From there, faster detection, fewer false alarms, and eventually prevention follow.  

The question worth asking is simple: how many of the incidents that hit your customers last quarter could have been caught before they ever reached them.  

If you are wondering how many incidents you could catch before they reach customers, an Observability Discovery for retail from VCG reviews where prevention is within reach across your digital journeys.

→ Book a free Observability Discovery | info@vcg.group | 0161 406 1820 

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