The athletic footwear and apparel retailer leverages InMoment’s Spotlight intelligence application to direct all support and feedback flows to a central location, improving the customer experience.
Foot Locker, an athletic footwear and apparel retailer, is obsessed with ensuring the customer is first and foremost when it comes to competitive strategies, expansion, and growing its base of fans.
It’s a brand, according to its website, that aims to unleash the sneakerhead in all of us. It operates approximately 2,600 stores in 26 countries, with a franchise store presence in the Middle East and Asia.
But it’s hard to put the customer first and unlock anything about that customer, if a brand isn’t sure what that customer likes, doesn’t like, is upset about, or finds annoying when they makes purchases in store or on an online site.
Foot Locker had a big problem when it came to analyzing customer review data: it didn’t have a uniform view of review data from various sources, and it was essentially collecting reams of inaccessible and unusable data.
Use a known partner
So Foot Locker reached out to its longtime CX technology and services partner, InMoment, because the vendor’s business intelligence web application, Spotlight, aimed to analyze and find value in textual comments.
Spotlight was developed by Lexalytics, a pioneer in machine learning and NLP, acquired by InMoment in September 2021. It is in play with companies in various industries, from retail to manufacturing, according to Nate Morley, director of account management at InMoment. Jack in the Box is one of the latest big customers to sign up.
“We find that many companies are turning to us for this level of customer feedback analysis because we are able to offer a truly integrated CX solution that combines all the different signals, structured and unstructured data analysis and analytical superiority – and also provide a level of professional services and industry know-how to each unique client,” Morley said in an email interview. “Many retailers have learned the hard way that they can’t just go with an off-the-shelf solution and expect to get the level of results they need. They therefore chose us to be a true partner in their quest for great success. improve their customer experience.”
Foot Locker had learned the hard way and realized that its approach – using numerous software-as-a-service systems depending on where the data resided – was not working well.
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Tyler Saxey |
“Before we implemented Spotlight, our call center data flowed through one platform that made call logs inaccessible for analysis, while our survey data came in through a different platform…and so on for everyone our comment streams (chat, email, etc.),” said Tyler Saxey, senior director of omni-global VOC and care solutions at Foot Locker, in an email interview.
“We can now analyze all of this feedback in one place, saving our CX team time, but more importantly, we can see granular feedback that we simply didn’t have the ability to see or act before. »
Spotlight gave Foot Locker the “key” it needed to unlock the sneakerhead side of customers and, just as importantly, to unlock the value of all its customer review data. Rolling out in early 2023, the retailer was able to consolidate all of its support and feedback feeds into one place and now has a “single source of truth” that provides uniform analytics against the hodgepodge pool of data that he used to treat.
Although it’s still early in terms of ROI, Saxey shared some early wins.
“We’re breaking down data silos, allowing us to see the consistent story with all of our comment data in one place. We have the ability to analyze comments with greater detail and precision. We’ve freed up resources and hours of customer support,” he said.
Improve customer experience
Before Spotlight, the brand’s support team manually categorized customer requests, a time-consuming and error-prone approach. It now has a universal taxonomy across all of these data sources to capture top complaints, topics, themes, sentiments, intent and more, which it can track over time.
According to Saxey, this streamlines the process of improving the customer experience and, ultimately, the business.
Crucially, Foot Locker can now identify specific customers who have had negative experiences and contact them in a timely manner to make corrections.
“There are always so many moving parts in implementing new applications and day-to-day learning and time spent learning from data,” Saxey said. “We look forward to learning more detailed insights from our omnichannel feedback and being able to leverage it even more broadly across the organization.” »
Deploying Spotlight provides insights that Foot Locker didn’t have and helps the brand from a business perspective when it comes to reducing churn and improving results.
“By making these changes, we’ve made it much easier to identify positive customer experiences and rectify negative customer experiences that we weren’t previously aware of, and this helps us, from a business perspective, to reduce churn rate and improve results,” Saxey said.
And, just as importantly, the technology eliminates points of friction with customers, which Saxey called “critical” in today’s omnichannel world.
“Everyone knows that we made a name for ourselves in the physical world and dominated that world for a long time. As we have moved to a digital and omnichannel world, we want to take this premium in-store service and translate it online and digital. Spotlight helps us achieve this goal,” he said.
Photo: LinkedIn
Judy Mottl is the editor-in-chief of Retail Customer Experience and Food Truck Operator. She has decades of experience as a journalist, writer and editor covering technology and business for major media outlets including AOL, InformationWeek and InternetNews.