Retail and ecommerce

The Home Depot + UserTesting

Read how UserTesting helped the Home Depot surprise and delight customers with empathy
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The Home Depot logo
Industry: Retail and ecommerce
Company Size: Enterprise
Role: Researcher
Customer Type: B2C

About The Home Depot

The Home Depot is the largest home improvement retailer in the North America with more 2,200 stores, supplying tools, construction products, and services.

The Home Depot achieved

Clearer product roadmaps
Increased customer empathy
Surprised and delighted customers

Challenge

In 2019, The Home Depot launched its Harnessing Customer Emotion initiative with the goal to weave customer emotion into its decision-making processes.

The team aimed to produce more meaningful experiences for customers—ones that not only get the job done, but also help them feel good about doing it with The Home Depot.

Solution

The Home Depot consulted internal and external stakeholders, such as UserTesting, to start speaking on an emotional level with customers. The company developed a framework for taking a customer's full experience—emotions included—to identify product deficiencies and potential improvements.

UserTesting helped The Home Depot pilot questions that specifically focused on emotions. And they used user highlight videos as the basis of emotional product mapping.

Outcome

The Home Depot has become more empathetic to the customer, which plays out in lots of little ways as it interacts with and builds for end users.

They're continuously identifying opportunities to surprise and delight their customers, instead of just satisfying them. And product managers are now making more compelling and persuasive arguments for their product enhancements and the resources they need.

Ki Arnould
Senior UX Researcher
"UserTesting helped us better understand how our customers feel, allowing us to produce more meaningful experiences for them - ones that not only get the job done, but help them feel good about doing it with us."
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