Valuing Customer Experience Management – A Lost Art In the Do-It-Yourself Business

Today, Lowe’s Companies, Inc. announced the layoffs of 1,700 workers who held positions between store manager and assistant store manager.  In their place, the company plans to hire up to 10,000 hourly, part-time workers who will staff the store on weekends when peak shopping occurs.  The underlying theme is to cut labor costs, including benefits of the full-time workers.

Lowe’s shares remain unchanged today, but the real test of the strategy will take place when customers interface with the new workers.  They are certain to face some frustration when they encounter workers with less expertise than those experts who were terminated.

This is eerily reminiscent of competitor, Home Depot’s, efficiency moves under newly minted CEO, Bob Nardelli, in 2000.  He moved to cut labor costs by eliminating expert employees who made the do-it-yourself customer’s experience a great one.  The Home Depot is still recovering from this move even though Nardelli has, long since, departed.

How do you attach a value to the customer experience?  Lowe’s, like The Home Depot before it, is about to find out.