Customer Obsession is Art

My son has been attending Home depot's kids workshop for an year. He picked up basic skills of making - using tools, glue and most importantly - "giving life to wood". As a parent, along with learning - I've become a FAN of Home Depot without my knowledge, here is why ?

Redmond and it's neighborhoods are heavily occupied with people working for companies like Microsoft & Amazon. These companies provide employment to immigrants from different parts of globe. As per datausa.io, there are 23,054 non-English speakers in Redmond. This means, different cultures, different languages, different shopping needs.

One unique attribute of this diversified customer base, is LANGUAGE - English is not their native language. During workshops at Home Depot, children are expected to speak out "Last Name" for validating against "Registration List". I've observed that children and their parents are often confused to speak out Last Name correctly. This whole confusion with names was causing delays in logistics - issuing kits, tracking attendance, supplies. Given that, these events are crowd pullers with ~800+ registrations. Managing kids, registrations is an uphill task. To amplify, with 2,286 stores in 4 countries, the scale of problem is much higher and could impact day- day's operation.  

Root Cause of this problem is Culture - not people, not process, not HomeDepot

In countries like India, First Name & Last Name are seldomly used - which means, educational institutes, websites, federal organizations, corporates and people only understand Name as - abbreviated Surname followed by actual name.

Example : I'm always referred as J. Pavan Kumar and not as Pavan K Jayavarapu.  

The management of Home depot could continue to operate in same way - assuming it's customer's problem. Interestingly, they showcased "Empathy", spend time to understand pain point, came up with a solution of explaining the meaning of Last Name in multiple languages. All it took, is an effort to understand customers and A4 sheet !!

A true sense of empathy & customer obsession

It apperas that, Home depot has silently created FANS over years with this kind of "Customer Obsession" attitude.

Loyality to customers :

The unseen illness with The Home Depot that you can’t find in the market reports is customer loyalty. I can’t help but predict all the investment and logistical changes are simply a race to the bottom. None of those things define these companies as a human company. I’d gladly pay extra and consistently return to a store that values me and that I can belong to. Source : link

ROI for loyalty:

One an average of 75 kids/store attending workshops each month. With 2,286 stores (and an average of 1.5 kids/adult), that’s 105,000 adults in the store on the 1st Saturday of the month that likely wouldn’t have been there otherwise. Now assume that 10% of those adults spend $100. That’s $1,050,000 each month. Now, consider the flip side, cancel the program and the parents don’t come in and spend – that’s an annual loss of $12.6 million. It’s also not unreasonable in the least to think that the program has some additional brand impact on the parents of these kids. Again, let’s conservatively assume that 10% of the parents make one additional trip to Home Depot and spend $100. That’s another $1,050,000 per year. Home Depot says that over 17.5 million projects have been completed in the workshops since 1997. I’m sure there are quite a bit of repeat visitors so let’s assume that the program has reached 6 million kids since it was initiated. That’s a lot of brand advocates with future purchasing potential. Once again, take a conservative assumption: let’s say 1% of those kids grows up to spend $300/year. That’s $18,000,000 per year

Source : link 

To conclude, while this story is my experince with Home Depot, Redmond. Every retailer and wholesaler should be mindful about diversified customer base and learn "Empathy" and "Customer Obsession" from Home Depot.