Walking in the Customers' Shoes

Training & Development, Oct 2007

The Home Depot

Atlanta, Georgia

A typical Home Depot store holds about 40,000 products. Because many of these products, for promotional or seasonal reasons, have short shelf lives, training employees on their characteristics and customer benefits must be completed promptly. To increase the consistency of content and decrease content development costs, the company partners with its suppliers to design and deliver product training.

This training is delivered through the company's rapid web-based training model, a video-driven e-learning experience that consists of 15 minutes of video and synchronized text, followed by an assessment. To keep production costs low and to keep the language as natural as possible, there are no scripts for video production, and the segments are produced in the company's in-house studio. Templates and streamlined production processes allow for replication and further reduce costs.

In developing the model, the learning team conducted a controlled study in which content modules were developed for products at three different price points. The training was delivered to stores in varying locations, and results were compared to a carefully selected group of control stores. Taking into account historical sales trends, product penetration, and year-to-year gains, trainers found significant improvement in sales of all three products. Six weeks after the training, the $100 product line showed a 19 percent increase; the $500 to $800 product line was up by 29 percent; and the $1,200 product line showed a 50 percent increase.

Product training doesn't occur in a vacuum but as part of a carefully planned curriculum that surrounds the development of all Home Depot employees. The company offers customized position-based curricula to approximately 83 percent of store associates. Each curriculum lists the minimum amount of classes required for each associate. Associates must complete the classes on a scheduled monthly basis to become effective in their positions. This approach, as well as the company's philosophy about hiring, represents a sea change over the past several years.

Leslie Joyce became Home Depot's first chief learning officer in 2004. "I was clearly directed to take learning to the next level. What that means is that we wanted to create formality and discipline in the process while optimizing informal learning," she says. Learning and development became a centralized function with decentralized deployment resources.

The company has transitioned through several phases of philosophy regarding the kinds of people it should hire. In the early days, many store associates were accomplished do-it-yourself types, from hobbyists to experts. As the company grew, talent pools of experienced candidates decreased, customer satisfaction ratings declined, and stores began to "hire for attitude and train for skill," as the company sought a stronger service orientation, Joyce explains. Now, the approach has settled into a sort of middle ground, where the company seeks a solid mix of people who are service-oriented as well as homeimprovement hobbyists or seasoned professionals-a specialized requirement that Joyce admits is far more difficult to find.

Improved customer service remains crucial for the organization, which suffered in the ratings for several years at the hands of its competitors. Joyce and her staff were involved in the design and implementation of the companywide Customers First initiative in 2006, which was aimed at making customer service the first priority of the stores. "There was a clear recognition of the need for improvement on the very front lines of the company," says Joyce, whose team had already designed leadership essentials and team essentials programs; customer essentials were the next logical step.

"Customer essentials are a group of specific behaviors linked to actions that guide associates to provide service that puts customers first," she says. "We wanted to surround the problem and expressly define what good customer service looks like. The essentials create a common language and provide store leaders with a yardstick to measure and coach for customer service."

The learning organization developed a learning map, which new associates receive on their first day of orientation. It illustrates customers' shopping journeys through the store by putting associates in customers' shoes. Participants interact with each other to form responses to hypothetical customer questions. In 2006, more than 100,000 new hires went through the orientation.

In a third component, the learning organization partnered with the customer service team to design action meetings, eight-hour sessions offered across divisions to share best practices and improve customer satisfaction results. In the six months following the meetings, "likely to recommend" ratings by customers increased in every division.

The company recognizes that leaders are crucial to ensuring and inspiring the learning and performance of its 364,000 employees. Although previous leadership development initiatives had focused on motivation and alignment, a new program launched in 2006 targeted learning as a key to business success. The new leadership learning forums educated 3,500 high performing leaders across the organization in three-day conferences that included presentations by senior leaders, workshops, simulations, competitive analyses, and leadership challenges. One innovative activity in an assetprotection workshop had participants playing a game in which they were the game pieces. In another session, as the audience watched a video case study, they used voting machines to help a fictional character choose the best ways to improve his financial reports.