For Home Depot CEO Craig Menear, it’s all about the customer experience.
Or, shall we say, the One Home Depot Experience.
“Our customers no longer think of us in terms of separate channels,” Menear said during the 2017 Investor and Analyst Day Conference on Dec. 6. “They don’t think of us as a brick-and-mortar channel and a digital channel separately. We want to enable the engagement with a seamlessness across channels, but candidly, that’s not how we were built. Now there’s a lot of work that has been done, but we must continue to tie together that seamless flow of information across all channels for both our customers and our associates. So, as the customer continues to blend the channels of engagement with The Home Depot, we must invest in the One Home Depot Experience.”
Menear noted that the company has made adjustments to its store fulfillment teams to consolidate and improve the customer experience around buy online, pick up in-store, buy online ship to store, and buy online deliver from store.
“We consolidated our outside sales force to better align capabilities of our Home Depot and Interline teams to address specific needs of different pro customer segments,” Menear explained. “And we invested in enhanced tools for our associates to better serve our pro customers. Supporting our strategy of connecting product and services to the customer needs, our merchant teams have increased the collaboration with our suppliers to drive innovation and efficiency, leading to greater value for our customers and our products. At the end of the day, product is why customers come to The Home Depot, and we must meet the local needs of our customers.”
Home Depot’s supply chain has been a great source of value creation for customers and shareholders, Menear noted.
“We have continued to focus on having the product available for sale through initiatives like Project Sync, while driving productivity,” he said. “We have invested in enhanced delivery capabilities as this is a growing segment for our business. We’ve talked a lot about our focus on our interconnected experience. The front door of our store is no longer at the front door of our stores. It’s in the customer’s pocket. It’s on the job site. It’s in their home. Developing the One Home Depot experience by bringing the physical and digital worlds together, with ability to handle the scale of Home Depot, required us to complete a re-platform of our website. This re-platform gives us the ability to create differentiated experiences for the customers going forward.”
Founded in 1978, Home Depot is the world’s largest home improvement retailer and comprises 2,278 retail stores in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, 10 Canadian provinces, and Mexico.