La-Z-Boy Crafts Unified Consumer Insights with InMoment: An Inside Look into the Brand’s Customer-Centric Transformation Journey

In a data-driven world, businesses must be tapped into consumer insights for a leading edge. However, for an enterprise like La-Z-Boy, the iconic furniture brand respected worldwide for almost a century, remaining focused on customer-centricity was proving to be a challenge. Coupled with pervasive variations in its store experiences, their story until now had chapters filled with disconnected and independently assessed data.

Enter Jorge Calvachi. Appointed as the Director of Insights, Calvachi was tasked with leading La-Z-Boy on a revolutionary journey toward a consumer-centric transformation. His foremost challenge? Bridging the digital-store experience dichotomy that was existing due to hybrid consumer behaviors.

Consumers engaged in a unique pattern where their journey to purchase La-Z-Boy products was an amalgamation of digital and in-store experiences. They began by researching products, deals, and availability online and subsequently visited the store to test the comfort. This made the customer-brand rapport a hybrid experience that was difficult to monitor consistently across different touchpoints.

Adding to this complexity was the variance observed among La-Z-Boy stores themselves. Not all were corporate-owned, and consequently, the experiences differed between brand-owned stores and independent dealerships.

Paving the way to connect the consumer-brand dots, Calvachi jump-started his mission by deep-diving into the available data structures. It quickly became clear the status quo – analyzing siloed data from different customer touchpoints independently – was an outmoded practice that needed to be retired.

A decision was made. To navigate beyond the age-old data practices, La-Z-Boy partnered with InMoment, an eminent customer experience management company. With a repertoire of impressive clientele and Jeff Catlin, a visionary CEO at the helm, InMoment was the perfect collaborator La-Z-Boy needed on their journey toward customer-centric transformation.

The heart of this collaboration was to establish a customer insights hub, a powerhouse that leveraged artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP) to conduct expansive sentiment and intent analysis. A point where all data converged, this hub’s goal was to integrate data from all consumer touchpoints, validate it, and afford La-Z-Boy a panoramic view of their customers across channels and stages in their customer journey.

The journey hasn’t been without its hurdles, but the persistent drive towards understanding and delivering a consistent, laudable experience to every customer, no matter where they engage, is the guiding vision. With ambitious moves like aligning with InMoment, La-Z-Boy shows it’s ready to march towards the future, armed with deep-seated customer-centricity at its core.

Needless to say, the journey to customer-centric transformation demands more than just adoption of cutting-edge technology. With leaders like Jorge Calvachi taking the reins and synergizing with dynamic partners such as InMoment, La-Z-Boy is not just reshaping its future but laying the groundwork for an industry-wide change.
The message for businesses grappling with similar challenges couldn’t be clearer: adapt and evolve, because being future-ready starts today.