Journeys Video Testimonial

Speaker: Billy Bennett, Director, Retail Data Analytics, Journeys

Billy Bennett: My name is Billy Bennett and I work for the Journeys Group. We are a branded footwear retailer that's mostly mall based. What's unique about our stores is that our sales associates are commission based. So really a fun, fast-paced environment for our employees and our customers. Really fashion footwear across all different categories. Casual, fashion, athletics. We do have something for all customers including, you know, our kids division journeys kids, but our core customers are really teenagers, really looking to serve that fashion forward teenager that's looking for the hottest trending footwear.

Billy Bennett: We were not counting traffic in any of our stores and we had a you know, over 1000 stores and in our 30 year history at the time, had never counted traffic with with any partner. Conceptually, I think it was believed that because we were commission based, that our conversion would be best in class and that we wouldn't need to you know, pay for this service in order to measure conversion because we were getting the best that we could. Obviously, there are a lot of blind spots with that thinking the biggest of which is the amount of traffic that we're getting when the traffic is coming in, what's our staffing look like compared to that traffic and then just as at an overall level, what impact our trends and our traffic trends are having on our business. When we make these different product buys, is it bringing more customers into our stores? Or you know, maybe hurting our traffic. So a lot of misses without that information. Now over a decade later, I honestly cannot imagine running our business without that visibility.

Billy Bennett: As I mentioned, we didn't have traffic counting capabilities whatsoever. So I think the original thought was that we would drive conversion through performance because everything we had done as an organization was performance based, like you can sell better, you can do better, give better service, better customer experience. So that was conceptually what we were getting into it for - but the biggest impact was absolutely just getting the traffic, seeing how much each store was getting, when they were getting it, their power hours, what were the most important times of the week and then trying to line up our staffing with that, which was incredibly difficult at first because we also did not have a workforce management system. So we were, when we rolled out with ShopperTrak Analytics we were kind of trying to apply this information and get our, you know, district managers, our field management to learn the information and kind of just, you know, use it for when they're scrubbing schedules and try to set up our teams in the right place at the right time. There was so much opportunity there that even with that very difficult way to implement that, we saw success right away. And then that's kind of evolved where we've taken our scheduling into a workforce management system and now have that visibility and are able to very much fit our staffing to the traffic and the days and hours that we see it. So, it's been a long-lasting impact. Not just the low hanging fruit, which was very easy to get in year one and year two, but something that's continued to evolve and allowed us to manage our business in some of the best years in the history of our company and, and some of the tougher years as well.