Foot Locker is an American sportswear and footwear retailer that hardly needs an introduction — there’s probably at least one in your city. But it’s a brand with roots dating back to 1879, a brand that managed to cut through the noise of its competitors by putting the customer first.
With presence in 28 counties and over 3,000 physical stores worldwide, Foot Locker also witnessed unprecedented e-commerce growth in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and people took to online shopping.
How did they manage to keep customers happy?
We interviewed Dirk Soetekouw, Director of Customer Care EMEA at Foot Locker, and Pamela Delahunt, Senior Manager of Customer Care at Foot Locker Europe, to learn more about their journey towards increased efficiency over the past 4 years and the role Kaizo had to play in it.
Kaizo for Foot Locker in 5 seconds
For Foot Locker, Kaizo is not just a platform that helps them enhance productivity and efficiency of resources — it’s also a reliable partner that is always there for feedback and cooperation.
“Kaizo is an application that is integrated with Zendesk…And it’s a great way to measure, analyze, and improve customer care performance from management level all the way to agent level”
Dirk Soetekouw, Director of Customer Care EMEA at Foot Locker
“Kaizo is a great app that can really help not only managers with performance management, but also agents to own their own success. Kaizo is very forward-thinking — you’re always coming up with new ideas but are also open to feedback. Kaizo is a great partner to work with.”
Pamela Delahunt, Senior Manager of Customer Care at Foot Locker Europe
Discovering Zendesk and Kaizo
Acting on their growth capabilities back in 2018, Foot Locker came to discover one of the leading CRM software solutions, Zendesk. They needed a tool that could be easily implemented Europe-wide in different languages, integrated with other solutions, and had all the functionality they needed — Kaizo was and is a great supplement to these needs.
“For us it was both quality and performance management. We wanted to get involved and have more visibility into that. That’s why we started looking for an extra tool, other than just Zendesk.”
Pamela Delahunt, Senior Manager of Customer Care at Foot Locker Europe
Letting mission lead the way
With a mission to fuel a shared passion for self-expression among young people, the Foot Locker team put the needs and wants of their target customers at the heart of everything they do.
Wherever it is in Europe or beyond, they always account for the culture, age group, and market they are dealing with, adjusting their language accessibility, communication, tone of voice, and store availability accordingly.
After all, the brand is very much committed to exceeding its audience’s expectations and creating experiences that make customers feel connected and emotionally engaged with their family of brands, which includes Nike, Adidas, Vans, and Puma.
Through the years, the focus on improving customer experience has become increasingly important as one of the differentiating features of the company.
Between 2020 and 2021 alone, CSAT went up by 13% in the European Customer Care contact center
What explains Foot Locker’s global success is this — they have a clear-cut strategy guiding the way towards excellence, which includes resource efficiency.
This strategy is multi-faceted and it covers all the aspects that can create an unrivaled experience for their customers.
Goal 1: Elevating customer experience — it always starts with understanding current performance and identifying areas for improvement.
Goal 2: Investing in long-term growth (people, processes, and tools) — with good customer experience in place, you can start focusing on the long-term growth perspective.
Goal 3: Driving productivity — real-time insights into team performance and a baseline to look back at helps increase the overall output.
Goal 4: Leveraging the power of people — helping Agents enhance their skills, expertise, and personality features that could make it easy for them to deliver excellent customer service.
Tapping into productivity insights
Between 2020 and 2021, Foot Locker Europe cut Resolution Time by 75% and Reply Time by 37% in their Customer Care contact center
How did this happen?
In 2020, COVID-19 hit right at the time when Foot Locker would be normally ramping down, anticipating a quieter period ahead. But because of the massive shift in shopping habits, they faced volumes that more than doubled, creating a backlog of orders and requests to process.
On top of that, the global lockdown meant that everyone had to shift to working from home, new team members joined the company and went through their training online, rather than face-to-face — something never done at Foot Locker before.
To process all the workload, improve their metrics, change key processes, and adapt to the increased demand before the end of 2020, the Foot Locker team decided to rely on the solution that would provide more insights into team performance and help them pinpoint areas that needed improvement.
That’s where Kaizo came into the picture.
Driving efficiency up
Less is more, as long as you know how to play the efficiency game right — and Foot Locker definitely does.
In their case, efficiency is about visibility and ownership.
For Agents to excel, especially in times of heavy workloads, they need to feel empowered, they need to feel like they have control over their performance and success.
“Kaizo for them was like they can own their own performance. So they can see day to day directly how they are doing — rather than having to wait until their 1-on-1 meeting with their manager to see how they did over the last week”
Pamela Delahunt, Senior Manager of Customer Care at Foot Locker Europe
Managers and Team Leads have their own share of insights to work with, too. They can now go to the dashboard, pick the metrics they need to look into, and then mix and match to see what’s happening in their teams — all in real time and in one tool, which saves time and simplifies the process itself.
But efficiency is not just about having access to real-time data — it’s also about acting on it, using the data to tell Agents where they can improve and how.
To ensure this string of continuous improvements, the Foot Locker team uses Kaizo’s functionality to look into specific tickets, rating, performance, and give relevant feedback.
“It definitely helps first line managers give feedback to Agents. It’s also easy for the Agents to see what feedback they are getting right in Kaizo…The trainer can also help the first line manager if they see that maybe their feedback can be improved or how they see and bring things to the Agents”
Pamela Delahunt, Senior Manager of Customer Care at Foot Locker Europe
And although Foot Locker Europe and Kaizo have come a long way together, there are still a lot of exciting things waiting ahead. For one thing, Kaizo continuously releases new features so Foot Locker has yet to discover the full potential of the tool, which will help them take their performance management processes even further.
