-Boy begins its digital transformation journey

Jorge Calvachi said, “Everything begins with a business problem rather than a technology challenge.” “This iconic brand has been around for almost 100 years, but it never had a function that focused on consumer insights.”

Calvachi, who was hired as director of insights about 18 months ago to fix this problem, has been working on it ever since. Calvachi also refers to himself as an “insights Rainmaker”. La-Z-Boy has been successful because of its quality and durability. But the competition is catching up, he says. Consumer-centricity is the new competitive edge in any industry, but especially here. “How well do you understand the consumer?”

Multi-touchpoints

La-Z-Boy is faced with the challenge of a brand that is well-known to consumers, but in so many ways. La-Z-Boy’s customer experience is also typically hybrid.

Calvachi stated that one of the most important things they learned was that people take longer to purchase a piece furniture. “A large part of the journey involves browsing the internet and searching for our products, location, availability, bargains — but they also want to test it out in the store. How can you meet all of these needs at different touchpoints and still maintain a seamless experience? “The customer perceives La-Z-Boy as everything, but our biggest challenge is that we can’t deliver the exact same experience between digital and store.”

La-Z-Boy stores are more than just a shop. Calvachi said that the business had more control over the customer experience when it comes to corporate stores.

Calvachi started by performing studies using the data he had available. He soon found out that data from different customer touchpoints was siloed. He said that “every single customer touchpoint was being analyzed separately and independently. It wasn’t shared with other functions.” “We’re aware of the problem, but haven’t managed to solve it.” The platforms are not compatible with each other, and the methodologies are different.

Calvachi concluded that the data practices of businesses were stuck in 1980s and 90s. “I called some friends. A few names popped up. “I also connected with Gartner. Some of the names that they gave me were similar, so I called them and the conversation with InMoment began.”

Customer insight hub: Building one

InMoment describes themselves as a customer experience company that offers “full service”. Jeff Catlin said, “We provide a lot more consultative services on top of technology.” Catlin is now the head of InMoment’s AI, machine-learning and natural language processing practice. He was previously CEO of Lexalytics. InMoment acquired Lexalytics in 2021, a platform which used AI-powered NLP for at-scale sentiment analysis and intent analysis.

InMoment is helping Calvachi create a hub for customer experience. Calvachi stated: “We’ve identified the key customer touchpoints – digital, in-store, post purchase, and the call center, which we call “comfort” care). We will bring together all of this structured and non-structured data. This data will need to be aggregated in order to make organizational decisions.

Data from digital channels will be the starting point. The data will be brought in step by step, and this is because each stakeholder must buy in.

Technology is easy, but people are difficult

Calvachi, when asked about the timeline of his implementation (it is still early), said that the biggest challenge was to get a large and diverse organization around the world to adopt the solution.

Catlin also agreed that the technical implementation of the solution was not a problem. He said that omnichannel implementation was not difficult. It’s about understanding the needs and wants of the client and ensuring that all stakeholders buy into the idea. It’s more than just the technology. It’s about the experience. We did a huge implementation in three months at a major athletic retailer. “The technology implementation isn’t difficult; it’s just the buy-in.”

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InMoment began by focusing on gaining customer insights through surveys. Catlin claims that over the past three years it has evolved into a true multichannel offering. This is not the least due to the Lexalytics integration. You’re listening in on call center recordings — and these things are monsters, because a call can last nine or ten minutes. This is very different from a survey that only takes three sentences. You need to be able pull in all digital sources: social, chat, and everything. The magic is in normalizing the data, and finding — to sound a little techy — a sort field that’s common.

Catlin said that they start in the middle of La-Z-Boy and work their way out. InMoment’s reporting will vary depending on who is using it. Calvachi, an analyst like many call center agents, might use dashboards that provide insights from all departments.

What will success look for La-ZBoy like? More conversions? More conversions? Growth in revenue? Calvachi said, “The customer experience is number one.”

La-Z-Boy begins its digital transformation journey