That also helps us make good recommendations for their shopping cart. I want to give credit for much of these improvements to the growing group of data scientists at Home Depot, who have been leveraging data to discover what kinds of predictions we can make in terms of forecasting the customer’s journey, and determining what type of project. You’re never really done, because customer behaviors, product names and overall trends keep changing, so it’s a continuous journey. That said, we’re still in early phrases with the effort to improve search relevancy, and we’re giving it some time to play out. Customers are getting where they intended to go, and our investments are doing what we want them to do. The feedback we’re getting with these efforts is positive the decline in secondary searches, along with customer satisfaction scores and customer feedback, tell us that we’re going in the right direction.
Retail TouchPoints (RTP): What’s behind Home Depot’s focus on improving search relevancy?ĭaniel Grider: We realize that customers want to go in and get the tools or products they’re looking for, and so search is the new front door to our stores. Grider discussed the reasons why Home Depot has focused its resources on improving search, as well as the retailer’s overall commitment to technology as a competitive advantage. While these efforts are ongoing, Home Depot already has noted a decline in secondary searches, meaning more shoppers are discovering the products they’re looking for on their initial attempt. He admitted that while Home Depot previously didn’t offer a best-in-class search experience, the retailer has made a “conscious investment” to use the data from the 3.6 billion visits to its digital properties to improve the search process.
“Our goal is to improve the simplicity of the Home Depot experience, because we know it can be complicated and cumbersome,” said Daniel Grider, VP of Infrastructure and Operations at the retailer in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. Sharpening the search experience is particularly critical for home improvement retailers, with their hundreds of thousands of SKUs, multiple and widely varied product categories and shoppers whose knowledge about the intricacies of home improvement is often limited. Too many wrong turns and dead ends and a retailer may have lost not just this particular sale but the customer as well. Customers’ search experience can swiftly move them along the funnel, but it can just as easily stop them dead in their digital tracks. As the starting point for so many shopper journeys, the search bar also represents the first potential fork in the road.
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