Yelp has turned to Splunk to help it to manage the vast quantities of data it deals with in order to improve customer service and find new revenue opportunities.
The idea behind this decision is that the company currently generates enormous amounts of data that, along withbeing difficult to understand by those outside of IT, is spread across different areas of the business. The hope is that Splunk will help to ‘democratise’ the data allowing more employees to gain insight from the information collected, along with correlating all log and server data in a central point
By December 2016, Yelp has garnered over 65 million unique mobile web visitors per month, including reviews, food delivery, payments and restaurant reservations, leading to a mass of data, Splunk has been deployed to make it more accessible.
Kris Wehner, VP of engineering, Yelp Reservations, said: “Yelp is a digital-first business. An excess of 10 terabytes per day flows into Splunk Enterprise, so the ability to quickly access and gain insights from that data in real time is invaluable.”
“With Splunk, we put data into the hands of Yelp teams and users that historically had no access or insight. The team can now pinpoint underperforming services by examining the changes in user-response time, as well as be notified in real time of issues on the site to ensure issues are solved faster.”
Yelp is now using Splunk to aid the customer facing aspects of its business such as Eat24 in order to monitor orders, and community management in order to address customer concerns more efficiently.
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This new method of monitoring has allowed the company to properly analyse customer trends and identify new possible methods of revenue, where there was previously thought to be no market.
Rick Fitz, SVP of IT Markets, Splunk, said: “Customers are at the heart of everything Yelp does. Our ability to address not only IT and operational issues, but also customer-facing issues in real time is transformative.”
“With Splunk Enterprise running alongside an open source strategy, Yelp has democratised data across the organisation, allowing all departments to build a better experience for customers in a cost-effective way.”
Yelp has moved towards a cloud based infrastructure over the last two years and, to take full advantage of this new partnership, has built an extension to bring Amazon Redshift data into the fold as well.
