Home Depot runs special workshops on a variety of home renovation topics. They’ve simplified the scheduling by setting up a national roster of clinics that run at every store at the same time every week. So, every Thursday at 7 in Feb would be a flooring installation seminar.
From a roll-out point of view, it’s brilliant. No registration, just show up – at any store, wherever is convenient for you.
We tried it yesterday.
No dice. The store we went to decided not to run the clinic. Despite the local advertising circular and the website encouraging customers to come into that store at that time “We do one on Saturday” was the message we got.
It’s really great and all for the corporation to set up a program, but if the local stores can’t act on it, it’s worthless.
It was a pretty big waste of time to hustle over to Home Depot midweek, on their schedule. I’m not sure I’m willing to try again; my trust for the organization to actually deliver on the class is zero.
Very disappointing; the potential is great, the execution is crappy.
[...] I blogged previously about our ridiculous experience in showing up at Home Depot for one of their advertised clinics, only to find that our local store lamely opted-out of the class (but not advertising the class). I contacted Home Depot corporate and got back this response Dear Steve Portigal, [...]
Pingback by Portigal Consulting 07.14.06 @ 3:24 pm[...] John Costello (all quotes approximate): “I am often asked how many brand managers do we have? The answer is 325,000 – the number of associates we have.” He went on to stress how all the touchpoints for the customer need to work together. You may see a great ad on TV but if you go to the website and it’s difficult to use, it’s no good. This isn’t so trite because as much as it’s a good idea, it’s just not practiced that way. Home Depot certainly isn’t living up to Costello’s idea. My bad experience with their “clinics” here and see here for their non-response when I tried to resolve it. [...]
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