Analyzing experiences is essential for finding new ways to improve the customer experience, providing the most reasons for them to return. When a company is selling a product, it is important to make sure that the product can appeal to the most potential customers within their target market to drive sales. However, by providing an excellent customer experience and re-targeting previous customers in the future, they may return to make a purchase through their service yet-again. This is known as the customer lifetime value (CLTV) and it is an important metric as it is more cost-effective to keep existing customers than to try to get new ones. Finding ways to increase the customer’s value is a great way to grow a business.
For this post, I’ll be analyzing my own customer experience when I purchased my newest pair of shoes, Tyshawn Jones’ signature shoes by Adidas Originals.
I personally love skateboarding as a hobby. However, this hobby is detrimental towards any pair of shoes as they tend to ware down significantly over time. This means that a typical skateboarder would reasonably have buy a new pair of shoes every few months depending on how often they like to skate. A few months ago, I found myself in this position of tearing through my old pair and having to buy a new one.
Tyshawn Jones is a professional skateboarder and I found out about his shoes through one of his sponsored skateboarding videos. He is currently one of my favorite skateboarders so my expectations for his shoes were very high, as a professional skateboarder would need to rely on a great pair of shoes, much like a professional basketball player or tennis player would rely on theirs. From a rhetorical appeals point-of-view, he is a very credible source to be promoting shoes much like Michael Jordan is credible in promoting his own basketball shoes.
I went on the Adidas website to learn more information about the shoes, the pricing, the color-ways, and overall how it looked in terms of its silhouette and on body. The website features many photos of the shoes from all different angles so that I had a good idea of how it would look in person along with the design and construction. I was able to easily see what sizes were available, customer reviews, the quality rating, and especially the fitting rating.
The fitting rating gave me a rough understanding of the relative size, width, comfort, all important things for any buyer looking into a new pair of shoes. The website even provided measurements and instructions for how I could measure my own feet at home to ensure the best possible fit. I didn’t do that of course but I appreciated that they provided that option anyways.
The checkout process was easy and straightforward. Very typical of what you would see from most e-commerce platforms in terms of checkout processes. Adidas provided me with the option to join the “Creators Club”, another means of generating leads with benefits of unlimited free-shipping, returns, and even exchanges. This offer would appeal to almost everyone from a logos perspective as saving money on shipping and more customer benefits through expanded services is a very compelling offer. However, I passed on this one.
I received my package in a reasonable time frame, roughly two weeks, and I was excited when it arrived at my door. The shoes were just as impressive as they were on the website and fit very well after a bit of “breaking them in” (more skateboarding). Overall I was pleased with my purchase.
However, even though I enjoyed my experience, I did notice a key-aspect that they could implement for improving the customer experience even more. Adidas is a major shoe company with countless product offerings. However, Adidas Skateboarding is a niche sub-group of the overall brand similar to Nike SB, the skateboarding branch of Nike. To improve the experience of other skateboarders looking to buy shoes from Adidas. My initial problem when searching for skate shoes was that my previous pair were worn out relatively quickly because they were not durable or well-made for what I put them through. When I was researching a new pair of shoes, I had to research outside of the Adidas website in order to find information about their durability. Much like their quality and comfort rating, I think that including a durability rating specifically for their skate shoes would help future buyers like myself make the purchase decision faster without having to leave the website. For myself, that was the only, and most important, information that was missing from the website. If they could implement the durability rating, along with a shoe review from a skateboarder, I think that would improve the customer experience for other skateboarders looking to buy Adidas shoes in the future.
With all of these things considered, I had an excellent customer experience with Adidas and would likely purchase from them again.
Malvin Malai Harrison 
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