La-Z-Boy drives growth with enterprise data
A furniture brand is supporting a brand reinvigoration effort by enabling the sharing of information across the company.
In the wake of changing consumer behaviors and new competitors that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic, La-Z-Boy launched a corporate strategy called “Century Vision” in 2021. Century Vision is designed to drive growth through La-Z-Boy’s centennial year in 2027.
As part of this new strategy, the company established a consumer insights division, which did not exist before. This division dives deep into La-Z-Boy’s consumers, collecting and analyzing data on who they are, what they want, and how they shop.
However, La-Z-Boy discovered that for the findings of its consumer insights division to help make decisions and drive informed actions throughout the organization, there needed to be a central hub for quick and easy data access. The retailer decided to implement the Stravito enterprise insights platform to serve as this hub.
The retailer selected Stravito because its platform offered features such as the ability to provide search results based on keywords from adjacent topics, eliminating the need to type in exact phrases or spelling. Users can also instantly click and share documents and set up specific project teams.
La-Z-Boy started on the platform with a soft launch of 10 employees that took less than two months, and has gradually expanded usage.
“Our vision is that we will over time provide an enterprise-wide hub where all of La-Z-Boy's 11,500 employees can access insights,” said Megan Battig, senior consumer insights manager at La-Z-Boy. “Right now, we’re looking at habit adoption: Are people signing in? Are they searching? We're in those early stages of exploring the tool and making it part of our day-to-day usage.
“In the future, we will start measuring if and how teams are using insights to make decisions, really evaluating if we are making an impact within the organization, and if our cross-functional peers are using insights to make informed decisions,” said Battig.
Headquartered in Monroe, Mich., La- Z- Boy operates over 900 stores across the U.S. and is a division of residential furniture producer La-Z-Boy Inc.
Shoppers see a personalized future
With its Century Vision initiative, La-Z-Boy appears to be aligning with what customers want from future shopping experiences. A recent survey https://chainstoreage.com/retail-2030-what-do-shoppers-expect of 1,000 U.S.-based consumers from Synchrony reveals that 80% of respondents will expect experiences curated just for them by 2030.
And 81% of respondents expect to see a world where hyper personalization or "just for me" is rolled out, and 55% of respondents expressed an intent to use on-site personalization services if they were available.