Lowe’s Omnichannel Strategy + Design

Setup

More and more Lowe’s customers were buying online and picking up in store. Checkout was quick and easy, but the trip to the store wasn’t. The ready email went out before the order was staged. Every store put pickup somewhere different. Customers walked in the front door asking where to go. The digital experience stopped at the parking lot, and it was the part people remembered.

What I Led

We started with customer immersion. We rode along on real pickups, stood behind the counter with associates, and followed the order from the confirmation email to the trunk. We mapped every point where the experience broke, ranked the improvements by customer impact and what it would take to run them in a live store, and chose a small set that worked together end to end. Before we built anything, we turned that set into storyboards and tested them with customers, both in conversation and with surveys. What we learned shaped an end-to-end journey map of the new pickup experience, covering the app, the sales floor and the back room. That map is what went into the pilot.

What We Delivered

The new pickup experience covered the website, the app and the store. Customers saw a real ready time at checkout, got a “ready” alert only after the order was actually staged, and could tap “on my way” so the store knew they were coming. In the store there was one name everywhere, Online Pickup, with a choice of lockers, a named counter or curbside. Associates got a pickup queue sorted by arrival time instead of order date. We designed new customer-facing collateral and an experience playbook so every pilot store ran pickup the same way. The pilot ran in 8 stores for 8 weeks. Customer satisfaction reached 97%, a 44% lift, and 90% of customers were promoters.