Shoe Carnival Revolutionizes Customer Experience

Using Verint Experience Management, Shoe Carnival now has a fully connected platform enabling the company to listen, analyze, and act on customer feedback across channels.

The results

Redesigned an entirely new CX program and customer service model in 90 days.
Reduced the time for survey development to two hours or less while also eliminating the need for focus groups.
Improved reaction time for online sales issues from weeks to near real-time.

About Shoe Carnival

For many companies, it can take years to stand up a successful customer experience (CX) program. However, Shoe Carnival, the billion-dollar omnichannel shoe retailer, had to do it in just 90 days due to the rapid onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shoe Carnival, which sells its merchandise through its website, as well as through its network of retail stores in 35 states, was already amid a large CX program overhaul when the pandemic hit. It was redesigning its customer service model and had just decided to bring order management, fraud, and payment all in-house. It was estimated that the project would take approximately nine months.

When COVID stay-at-home orders were implemented around the country, Shoe Carnival’s physical stores closed, and its online business exploded. The company’s existing customer service partner was unable to effectively handle the spike in volume or smoothly transition to support a remote contact center model.

As a result, Shoe Carnival was unable to ensure an optimal customer experience for its consumers. Average speed-to-answer was often two hours or more, which caused people to hang up, call again, and email. This only exacerbated the problem. Customers were unhappy and front-line employees were overwhelmed.

Speed up your CX program evolution

Shoe Carnival turned to Verint Experience Management to help it quickly respond. The rapid evolution of its CX program includes leveraging Verint Web & Mobile and Verint Digital Behavior Analytics, which provide powerful CX case management and analytics capabilities, alongside a new order management system.

Under the leadership of David Hudspeth, manager of customer service and fulfillment at Shoe Carnival, the company revolutionized its CX program. It reimagined and created an innovative program, stood up a new customer service partner, and developed standard operating procedures based on customer feedback. Top priories included omnichannel measurement, executive support, and customer feedback – both structured and unstructured.

The company started tracking and managing CX within its ecommerce business. From there, it expanded to include stores and contact centers, growing to 12 measurements of key customer touchpoints across the enterprise.

Leadership buy-in was also key. To gain the support of the CEO and the entire executive suite, the Shoe Carnival CX team provided daily updates and reports throughout the changeover period.

Acquiring the trust of department heads, channel owners, and managers by showing the business impact of higher customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS) was also pivotal. Still, improved key performance indicators (KPIs) only matter if they paint a true picture of what’s happening with customers and, in turn, translate directly to the bottom line.

Listen, analyze, and act on customer feedback with Verint Experience Management

Using Verint Experience Management, Shoe Carnival now has a fully connected platform enabling the company to listen, analyze, and act on customer feedback across channels. This includes contact center conversations, customer feedback via IVR, SMS, and online surveys, customer-initiated digital feedback, and operational data from contact center, digital, and store interactions. The Verint solution also enables Shoe Carnival to include data points from outside sources.

Today, with critical CX capabilities such as Verint Web & Mobile, Shoe Carnival has:

Improved reaction time for online sales issues from weeks to near real-time.
Reduced the time for survey development to two hours or less.
Eliminated the need for time-consuming, resource-intensive focus groups to gather comprehensive customer feedback.

“Leveraging Verint Experience Management has been critically important to fueling a positive impact on business and strengthening the company’s commitment to customer success.”

David Hudspeth Manager of Customer Service and Fulfillment, Shoe Carnival

Fuel a positive impact on your business

While direct survey data is essential to Shoe Carnival’s CX program, the company’s CX team also relies heavily on text analytics. This enables it to drive enhanced insight and identify customer pain points early from the analysis of unstructured data across web chat, email, social media, and call notes. Using this kind of unstructured feedback, the team can identify and address where and why customers are struggling.

“Previously, we didn’t have a way to identify if a customer was having a problem on the website,” says Hudspeth. “Now, with Verint Digital Behavior Analytics, we instantly know based on alerts when a customer is struggling and has feedback. We can watch the replay and our response time for fixing that issue is so much faster.”

Hudspeth adds, “Leveraging Verint Experience Management has been critically important to fueling a positive impact on business and strengthening the company’s commitment to customer success. It’s amazing how intuitive the feedback is because you’re not just getting what you want to know from customers. You also have a way to quantify how customers feel about the whole experience.”

Featured Verint solutions

Verint Experience Management
Engage with your customers and employees to capture, analyze, and act on their feedback in a closed-loop process across the entire organization.
Verint Web & Mobile
Unify data across all of your digital channels, enabling you to track the entire digital customer experience and fix any issues in real-time with in-the-moment feedback.
Digital Behavior Analytics
Customer session replays provide interaction data from mouse tracks, touch gestures, clicks and form interactions. Prioritize actions to optimize your CX based on real customer behavior on digital channels.