Getting Customer-focused Returns Vision Back on Track

ESVS Retirement didn't go as planned.

I joined the Store Systems team at the tail end of the retirement of a product called ESVS (Enhanced Special Services).

ESVS ran on very old outdated tech but was processing $278 Billion in sales each year.
Common Services ("COM") were being forced into ESVS in a hacky, volatile way.
It was created without understanding those who would be using it day-to-day

But the redesign didn't go as planned. Unanticipated complexity led to delayed timelines which led to multiple new apps popping up with 'feature parity' replacing innovation.

ESVS was retired. Our platform was more stable, but it wasn't more usable. User complaints came flooding in.

We do not should not pass complexity onto the customer.

About this time. our SVP came out with a customer-focused imperative:

“We strive in every interaction to make the customer feel valued by creating experiences that are end-to-end, customer specific, timely, and which simplify the complexity of Home Depot for the customer.

We make things easy for the customer even if it is not easy for us and we obsess as much about how a customer feels about an interaction as we do about the interaction itself.”

This gave us the green light to finally focus on working towards an easy-to-use seamless platform.

Our first area of focus was unifying the return experience.

Integrating the Returns Experience

Returns experience was chosen because it was the most confusing and painful for customers & store associates and had the biggest influence on repeat business.

PMs started focusing on features and architecture.

A designer on my team revived a service blueprint and mockups he had done previously.
The fine-tuned detail made stakeholders get hung up on technical details.

I knew we needed an experience vision to unify us. I asked my designer to take a step back and help tell a story. He put together current and future state context scenarios.

I took what he put together and helped refine it into a simple elevator pitch: Context Aware Design.

"If someone scans a receipt, chances are they want to do a return. If they look up a quote, there are a different set of actions. The onus should be on the system to cater itself based on context, not the users."

I facilitated sessions with product to pair the experience pitch with unified business opportunities it helped solve.

$843M Annualized Returns Operating Cost
$186M Transportation Cost
$3.9B in Refund Fees (transaction, re-ring, etc)
$2.5B in Cancellation Fees
$8.3B in non-restockable returns
$400M - $800M estimated returns fraud
$8.9B in estimated lost in-store labor productivity