EXCLUSIVE Q&A: Home Depot AI-enables store phone customer service
The Home Depot is improving in-store customer experience and associate effectiveness with artificial intelligence voice technology.
The home improvement giant is implementing new AI-powered phone agents built on Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience platform. Now, when calling a Home Depot store, customers can state the reason for their call in their own words.
The new system is designed to immediately understand what they need help with while ensuring they always have the option to speak directly with a human associate.
[READ MORE: Home Depot enters Google Agentic AI partnership]
Jordan Broggi, executive VP of customer experience and president of online at Home Depot, recently sat with Chain Store Age to provide insight into how and why the retailer is pursuing this customer service technology transformation.
What issues was Home Depot having with store phone customer service?
Our associates are the heart of Home Depot customer service, and we’re always looking for ways to help them do what they do best: providing hands-on expertise to customers in our stores.
Home Depot stores receive large call volumes from customers looking for local support. And while our associates want to deliver the best customer service to customers no matter where they are, customer phone calls do take associates away from the shoppers right in front of them.
We recognized an opportunity to improve both the customer and associate experience by introducing a new customer service AI voice agent system that runs on Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience and trained on foundational Home Depot project knowledge and our product catalogue. The new system will eventually handle all phone support for U.S. stores.
For the customer on the phone, the experience is faster and more intuitive. No more ‘press 1 for that’ and ‘press two for this.’ Customers can instead just say what they need, and the AI voice agent will understand what they want in seconds, getting customers to a solution four times faster than automated phone menus.
This also allows associates to focus on meaningful in-person interactions with customers who need help right there in the aisle.
Why did you select the Google Gemini solution?
Google is a longstanding technology partner of ours, and after some time experimenting together with customer service technology advancements, we saw a real step-function evolution with the latest Gemini conversational AI audio and voice models.
The models understand human conversation, intent, and engage in real dialogue. Gemini Enterprise also integrates seamlessly with our own back end – a combination of what we have co-created with Google and other tech vendors and Home Depot proprietary tech. All this together creates a more unified customer-facing experience.
In addition, Google provides the reliability and scalability needed to deliver a consistent, high-quality experience as we prepare to roll out this technology to our 2,000-plus U.S. stores.
What benefits do customers receive?
The primary benefits for customers are speed, ease, and proactive project support. Customers will be able to simply say what they need in their own words and preferred language, without navigating complex menus or phone trees.
The system can understand intent quickly, in as little as 10 seconds, and often resolve requests within a single interaction, helping customers get answers faster and with less effort. The new agents are also able to act on behalf of customers, responding to more nuanced and complex questions than just providing store hours, such as providing a recommended shopping list for a specific project, building a digital shopping cart and helping complete a purchase.
We also realize that some customers will always prefer speaking to an associate, and we want to make sure that’s always easy. This new system is designed with a ‘human backstop,’ so there is always a direct path to a human associate at any time.
What benefits do store associates receive?
By having AI agents handle many of the routine customer phone inquiries, our associates are freed up to focus on providing hands-on problem solving for our customers in stores. The feedback has been positive, with associates in stores piloting the technology reporting higher job satisfaction.
Are there any future plans for interactive voice respone customer service you can discuss?
We are currently focused on the rollout of the new technology to all U.S. stores by the end of 2026, delivering a better customer service experience that brings more ease and less friction to our customers.
While we are always experimenting and learning, we don’t develop AI for the sake of AI. Our AI vision will continue to be guided by where our customers tell us they want to go, and any future developments will be rooted in our core focus for all technology investments; improving the customer experience.
