Home Depot optimizes customer experience with real-time data
The Home Depot is supporting its seamless customer experience with centralization of relevant online and offline data.
The home improvement giant is expanding an existing partnership with Adobe to obtain comprehensive insights into its omnichannel customer journey. As part of Home Depot’s interconnected retail strategy, it offers a seamless customer experience extending across e-commerce, its mobile app, and in-store services such as pickup lockers and an in-app product locator.
Offering customers so many touchpoints, Home Depot hopes the Adobe partnership will enable it to optimize experiences across channels, while refining marketing efforts. This deployment marks the next phase of a partnership that began with Home Depot implementing Adobe digital tools including web analytics and A/B testing, as well as Adobe Creative Cloud applications to design and deliver new online services and experiences.
Specifically, The Home Depot is now adopting the Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (Real-Time CDP) and Adobe Experience Platform (AEP). The Home Depot intends to use the solutions to support highly personalized experiences by offering products that customers need to finish their projects, rather than offering products that are not relevant to their project goals.
AEP, underpinning Adobe’s Real-Time CDP, will serve as a central hub that brings together relevant online and offline data from across The Home Depot organization. It will act as a foundation for personalization efforts.
According to Home Depot, Adobe Real-Time CDP has already produced early results, allowing it to activate personalization campaigns in 24 hours or less, down from seven to 10 days. Because of this enhanced speed, if a customer is shopping for a product and purchases it, they will no longer receive irrelevant offerings days after the purchase.
“The Home Depot made early investments in providing omnichannel shopping experiences, and these digital and physical assets continue to guide our strategic priorities,” said Melanie Babcock, VP of integrated media at The Home Depot. “Our expanded partnership with Adobe will enable us to enhance the customer experience even further, driving personalization at scale and further optimizing The Home Depot experience across online and in-store.”
“Making the digital economy personal is the priority for leading enterprise businesses worldwide and a relentless focus on personalized customer experience has long been the guiding light for The Home Depot,” said Anjul Bhambhri, senior VP, Adobe Experience Cloud. “With Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), The Home Depot can align teams around a single view of the customer, with strict governance and activation capabilities that will make experiences even more connected and relevant.”
Home Depot puts money into search for leading-edge tech
In addition to partnering with an established solutions provider like Adobe, The Home Depot also recently launched to identify, invest in and partner with emerging tech companies focused on improving the customer experience and shaping the future of home improvement. The new Home Depot Ventures fund aims to invest in companies that “advance The Home Depot's ability to provide a seamless interconnected shopping experience, develop new and differentiated capabilities,” the company said.
At the end of the first quarter of fiscal 2022, Atlanta-based The Home Depot operated a total of 2,316 stores in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, 10 Canadian provinces and Mexico.