Tesco PLC, a British grocery and general merchandise retailer that operates in the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, and North America, was founded in 1919 with a simple mission, "to be the champion for customers, helping them to enjoy a better quality of life and an easier way of living." Tesco's objective is to deliver products and services in the right way for its customers. "Serving Britain's shoppers a little better every day" is its core purpose. For years, Tesco pursued this objective by increasing the number of physical locations in order to broaden its reach. Then, in 2000, the retailer switched to a digital strategy by introducing Tesco.com to the UK market. Tesco.com offered multiple services, including grocery, general merchandise, and clothing, as well as banking and insurance services. Despite this transition, however, the homegrown nature of Tesco's internal information systems made it very difficult for the company's business analysts to understand their customers' online experiences. Tesco had years of experience with the physical store presence, and it was known for being at the forefront of new technologies, communications, and social media. However, in the areas of social customer service and engagement, Tesco business analysts needed a broader view of which products and website features their customers used and which pathways resulted in the highest number of customers completing a purchase. In the sales industry, this process is referred to as lead conversions. Essentially, the company needed to upgrade its information systems in order to align its IT infrastructure with its mission. Therefore, in 2014, Tesco began to search for customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. However, its focus was on more than simply the CRM tool. Rather, the new system needed to bridge a gap across the organization. For more than a decade, Tesco had added, modified, and updated its systems to try to support its new website. This approach left the company with a challenging IT infrastructure that comprised more than 400 servers across 10 environments. This type of system expansion leads to the typical challenges of data redundancy, data isolation, and data inconsistency that arise when organizations have multiple systems (recall this discussion from Chapter 5). However, there are also issues with troubleshooting and making updates based on user requests. Information systems keep track of events (such as a transaction, a communication, or an error) in a file called a log. When there are errors, organizations measure their time to identify (MTTI-mean time to identify) and respond (MTTR-Mean time to respond) as an indicator of how well their support systems are functioning. Since Tesco has multiple systems, it also has multiple error logs to monitor and troubleshoot. Tesco relied primarily on custom scripts to make its log data available to developers and IT support teams. Its large and complex infrastructure made it difficult to manage error logs. This directly impacted its ability to identify and respond to issues, sometimes even impeding the company's mission to be a champion for its customers. The influx of new systems and the need to support multiple groups overwhelmed the company's homegrown log monitoring solution. Tesco needed a solution that would tie its information together and thus provide the company with a full view of its customers, including the customers' habits and decisions. It needed to identify the reasons why some customers stayed online and made purchases while others left with items still in their cart, so it could develop an appropriate response. It especially wanted to know whether any of its information systems were creating roadblocks for customers. The company had the basic data, but it was not able to pull the data together in a meaningful way in order to make any strategic decisions. Splunk Enterprise (www.splunk.com) turned out to be the solution that Tesco was looking for. Splunk is a multinational corporation based in San Francisco that produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing large machine-generated datasets, namely Big Data. Its system is designed to support web-based interfaces. Significantly, it consists of a single platform, thus making it relatively easy to adopt and implement. This solution was the perfect answer to Tesco's problems because it enabled the company to address both hardware and customer service data needs. Joshua Anderson, an applications engineer at Tesco, explained, "Early on, we were having trouble with checkout flow on the website [and] I remember just typing in 'error' and 'payment' in Splunk and all of a sudden we were able to narrow directly down to timeframes and see that there was a problem with our connectivity and the IP address." If there is one place where you do not want to have a negative customer experience, it is in the checkout flow! Prior to implementing Splunk, the Tesco application support team spent hours trying to track down the cause of the problem and the company lost many potential sales. After adopting Splunk, the company able to find and correct the problem and to establish alerts and dashboards to speed up the process of identifying and resolving future problems. As a result, Tesco was able to improve its customer experience and reduce the incidence of lost revenue due to abandoned shopping carts. As Anderson observed, "Once we started rolling out the Splunk platform and looking at some of the information we could extract, it opened up our worldlike putting on glasses for the first time." Due to the benefits Tesco has experienced in application support and development, the company has rolled out the Splunk platform to new areas. As a result, the company has obtained the full operational visibility that is necessary to analyze and optimize website behaviour in real time. Mean time to identify (MTTI) and mean time to respond (MTTR) have been reduced by 95 percent, and customer service escalations have decreased by at least 50 percent. In short, since deploying Splunk Enterprise, Tesco PLC has seen many benefits across the board, starting with its need for an efficient CRM.

Questions

1. Using Tesco as your example, discuss the challenges with homegrown computer information systems.