Customer Use Case: The Home Depot Innovates with Customer Experience Management

The Home Depot is really innovating when it comes to interconnected experience. And we’ve done some great things in that space, and we’ve reaped the benefits of that, now becoming the 6th largest e-commerce site, inside a 100 billion dollar company. This is a company that constantly, constantly tries to change and innovate. This is a company that doesn’t stay still. The hardest challenge is to stay ahead of the pack. We know there are other companies out there that are just as innovative and trying new things. So we have to work tirelessly to make sure that our experience is right. Since I joined Home Depot, I’ve been completely blown away by the scale at which Home Depot works. The kind of cutting-edge technologies that we use. My group in Home Depot manages the entire analytics, the homedepot.com business. We want to be able to measure effectiveness and understand which part of our customers are actually starting the journey online and then finishing it in stores. We want to be part of a customer’s journey, not just when they are building and renovating the house, but even for decorating the house. And that’s the vision that we’re trying to go towards.

Data-driven culture is extremely important, so we definitely want to use the data. The challenge sometimes is trying to figure out what the balance is between data, creativity, and brand. When user experience is done right, that creates brand loyalty. At the end of the day we’re not the users. We have to let the users go out there and test on these experience to make sure we’re coming back with the right one. That allows us to be smart and iterate in terms of those user needs and preferences.

Design plays a huge role in Home Depot. That fresh design eye is really helpful. Tools like XD, if we’re using it for prototyping, that kind of was one of those ‘ah ha’ moments. Like well, let me talk to my CRM team and see when they’re designing emails if there is a potential for them to benefit from this prototyping. I think it helps the designers to experiment with things that maybe they didn’t think about before. The Home Depot’s a great place for US designers. It’s an opportunity to come and work and blaze a trail of retail. So we need more dreamers, innovators, big thinkers who can come and change the face of what we’re doing in this space.

We have to show the return of investment. So all that being connected these days is making us more and more efficient. We are able to make difference to the top line numbers for the leadership. We are able to give insights to where the customers are truly struggling, so that we can really improve the customer experience. And being able to make that impact and being able to see how the adoption from the leadership as considering us as being the advisors of the business and not just the reporting arm, is the big thing that I feel as the exciting part of this particular journey. My vision for Home Depot in the future is to continue to scale, to continue to provide the best interconnected experience that we can, getting people to the products faster. So long as we can keep iterating on that, we’re going to be very successful. -