Foot Locker steps up customer experience via InMoment feedback analytics tech

Foot Locker, a footwear and sportswear retailer, is obsessed when it comes to making sure the customer is front and center when it comes to competitive strategies, expansion and growing its fan base.

It is a brand, according to its website, that aims to unlock the inner sneakerhead in all of us. It operates approximately 2,600 stores in 26 countries with a franchised store presence in the Middle East and Asia.

But it's hard to put the customer front and center, and unlock anything within that customer, if a brand isn't sure what that customer likes, dislikes, is upset about or finds annoying when shopping in-store or at an online location.

Foot Locker had a big issue when it came to analyzing customer feedback data — it didn't have a uniform view of feedback data streaming in from various sources and it was basically collecting reams of inaccessible and unusable data.

Tapping a known partner

So Foot Locker reached out to its longtime CX tech and services partner, InMoment, as the vendor's web-based business intelligence application, Spotlight, was all about analyzing and finding value in text-based feedback.

Spotlight was developed by Lexalytics, a pioneer in machine learning and NLP, which InMoment acquired in September 2021. It's in play with companies in a variety of industries, from retail to manufacturing, according to Nate Morley, director, account management at InMoment. Jack in the Box is one of the latest big clients to sign on.

"We find that a lot of businesses are looking to us for this level of customer feedback analysis because we're able to offer a truly integrated CX solution that combines all of the various signals, structured plus unstructured data analysis, and analytics superiority — and also provide a level of professional services and industry know-how to each unique client," Morley said in an email interview. "A lot of retailers have learned the hard way that they can't just take an off-the-shelf solution and expect to get the level of results that they need and have therefore chosen us to be a real partner in their journey to greatly improve their customer experiences."

Foot Locker had been learning the hard way and realizing that its approach — using many software-as-a-service systems depending on where the data resided — wasn't working well.

Tyler Saxey

"Prior to implementing Spotlight, we had call center data coming through a platform that made the call logs inaccessible for analysis, while our survey data came in through a different platform…and so on for all of our feedback streams (chat, email, etc.)," Tyler Saxey, senior director, omni global VOC and care solutions at Foot Locker, said in an email interview.

"Now we can analyze all of this feedback in one place which saves time for our CX team, but more importantly we can see granular feedback that we just didn't have the ability to see or act on previously."

Spotlight has given Foot Locker the "key" it needed for unlocking the "sneakerhead" in customers, and, just as importantly, unlocking the value from all its customer feedback data. Deployed at the start of 2023, the retailer has been able to pull all of its support and feedback streams into one central place and now has a "single source of truth" that provides uniform analytics compared to the hodgepodge data pool it once dealt with.

While it's still early going regarding return on investment, Saxey shared some early wins.

"We're eliminating data silos, which allows us to see the cohesive story with all of our feedback data in one place. We have the ability to analyze feedback in greater detail and accuracy. We've freed up resources and customer support hours," he said.

Boosting customer experience

Prior to Spotlight, the brand's support team was manually categorizing customer inquiries — a time consuming and error prone approach. Now it has a universal taxonomy across all these data sources to capture key complaints, topics, themes, sentiment, intentions and more, that it can track over time.

This, according to Saxey, is streamlining the process of improving their customers' experiences and, ultimately, the business.

Basically, Foot Locker now can pinpoint specific customers that have had negative experiences and reach out in a timely fashion to make corrections.

"There are always so many moving parts to implementing new applications and learnings day-to-day and time spent learning from the data," said Saxey. "We're looking forward to learning more detailed information from our omnichannel feedback and being able to leverage it even more broadly throughout the organization."

Deploying Spotlight provides insight Foot Locker didn't have and is helping the brand from a business perspective when it comes to reducing churn and improving the bottom line.

"By making these changes we have made it much easier to identify positive customer experiences and rectify negative customer experiences that we didn't have insight to before, and this helps us from a business perspective in reducing churn and improving the bottom line," said Saxey.

And, just as important, the technology is removing customer friction points — which Saxey described as "critical" in today's omnichannel world.

"Everyone knows we made our name in the brick-and-mortar world and dominated that world for a long time. As we've moved to a digital and omnichannel world, we want to take that white-glove, in-store service and translate to online and digital. Spotlight is helping us realize that goal," he said.

Photo: LinkedIn