Live from Your Office! It's ...

Home Depot: All Great Talk Shows Make Their Guests Feel at Home

Like the consummate talk-show host, Greg McMillan is a master at getting his guests to disclose their fondest hopes and deepest fears. Eight hours a day, five days a week, McMillan roams the aisles at a Home Depot outlet in Seattle, scouting out anxious home improvers, helping them overcome their biggest do-it-yourself worries. "People come in with a lot of fear -- fear of water, fear of electricity, and, if they're trying to put together a barbecue, fear of gas," says McMillan, 33, head of the Seattle store's garden department, who has a background in retail, child care, and education. "All I'm doing is empowering them."

At this particular moment, he's empowering a middle-aged couple who are starting a plumbing project. It's a relatively simple faucet installation, but McMillan is the picture of solicitude, gently probing the couple's grasp of plumbing -- which turns out to be essentially nil -- and then patiently going over every step of the procedure. In especially hard cases, McMillan will write down instructions, or suggest that customers attend one of the many free how-to clinics offered by the store. "You've got to find their comfort level and work from there," McMillan says.

It's a time-consuming approach, but it's one that has helped give Home Depot's 867 stores a $30.2 billion chunk of the $160 billion home-repair market -- and it illustrates how the talk-show model can work as brilliantly with customers as it does with colleagues.

Nearly three-quarters of Home Depot's customers are nonprofessional do-it-yourselfers who have a lot of questions. What the Atlanta-based company has done is to create a how-to culture in which customers feel comfortable asking those questions: It's audience participation - as - retailing. From the moment they enter one of the chain's cavernous stores (whose average size is 110,000 square feet, with another 28,000 square feet in the lawn-and-garden department), customers are drawn into casual dialogues aimed less at selling a particular product than at establishing a long-term relationship. "It looks informal, but it's a very deliberate part of our culture," explains Don Harrison, 54, manager of public relations.

For example, unlike other warehouse-style retailers, Home Depot doesn't use "greeters" -- employees who intercept customers at the front door and then direct them to items in the store. "We don't want customers simply being pointed to lumber on aisle nine," Harrison says. "We want employees to take customers to aisle nine and, along the way, to engage customers in a conversation and to find out what they really need."

The basic message: Putting on a good talk show is as much about listening as it is about talking. Just as Oprah and Leno listen carefully to gauge a guest's mood and then shift an interview accordingly, so each of the roughly 150 floor reps at a typical Home Depot outlet must be adept at sizing up customers. In split seconds, a floor rep like McMillan has to assess everything from the customers' mental state (gardening customers, for example, are nearly always in better moods than those who have plumbing questions) to their competencies and expectations -- usually by asking questions that draw customers out, without embarrassing them or exposing their ignorance. What is the customer building today? A deck? Well, just how familiar is the customer with pressure-treated lumber? Or with the benefits of brass screws? McMillan often takes his cues from the products that customers already have in their carts or in their hands. "Then I just expand on that," he says.

The key, says McMillan, is to recognize that most customers are as anxious to get good information as they are to buy a particular product. "People will ask, 'How do I install a dimmer switch?' " says Harrison, "and I'll say, 'First step is, turn off the power.' And they'll say, 'How do I turn off the power?' So I'll say, 'You turn off the power at the electrical panel.' And they say, 'Where's that?' "

Such exchanges serve a dual purpose: They save customers from having to make extra trips for so-called secondary purchases (which, according to company research, are almost always made at neighborhood hardware stores, rather than at Home Depot outlets). More important, they establish the feeling that employees are there to answer a customer's questions, even if that means not making a sale during the customer's first visit to the store.