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Home Depot senior vp and chief customer officer
Jose Lopez is Home Depot's senior vp and chief customer officer, a newly created position that's charged with measuring and improving the customer experience. One of Lopez's core beliefs: customer service is the ultimate differentiator in the home improvement retail business. He also believes in rewarding all stars - the fundamental principal behind the new Orange Juiced program.
Q: Why did Home Depot create the Orange Juiced program, and how's it going?
A: The program itself is, as you can imagine, a component of a larger picture that is the Customer First Initiative. So as we're trying to continue to [motivate] our associate base that's what we call our employees - we want to make sure that those people that are doing great are rewarded and those people that are improving are rewarded. So we created Orange Juiced, which is $30 million, fully dedicated to reward individual associates as well as the overall store for the performance that they are doing in terms of taking care of customers.
Q: How do you score points with that?
A: Number one is your customers. We get 150,000 to 250,000 voiceof-the-customer responses every single week. That's a weekly scorecard of people that are actually purchasing from us. They tell us 'Here's what's important, and here's how you're doing against it.' So that's one.
In addition to that, the peer group of individuals that work in a particular store will highlight individuals that are doing a great job....