Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360
Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360
Bringing Homes to Life: A Q&A with At Home on Making the Customer Experience Richer Through Value
At Home is a retail superstore focusing on holiday, seasonal, and decorative items for the home. The company was first established in South Texas in 1979 under the name Garden Ridge Pottery. Popular in the south and southeast, the number of stores grew to 50 over the course of the next three decades. In 2012, company leadership changed, and by 2014, the name evolved to At Home.
Now with 267 stores, At Home specializes in product categories ranging from furniture, rugs, curtains, wall décor, bed and bath, and more while promising customers “new thousands of lower prices storewide” every day. For Insider Perks members, the brand offers exclusive low pricing on select deals, receiptless returns, and sneak peeks for special promotions and events while adding on special gift eligibility and the opportunity to become a VIP and enjoy additional benefits.
Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, spoke with Susan Rodgers, CMO of At Home, about the brand’s customer loyalty program, the importance of delivering a true value proposition, and how the co-branded Synchrony credit card affords members easy access.
Good afternoon, good morning. This is Mark Johnson from Loyalty 360. Hope everyone's happy, safe and well Wanted to welcome you back to another edition of our Leaders in Customer Loyalty series. In this series we have the privilege of speaking with leading brands about what they are seeing and hearing on the front lines of customer channel and brand loyalty. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Susan Rodgers. She's a chief marketing officer at At Home. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us, Susan. It's great to meet you.
Susan Rodgers:Great to meet you, mark. Thank you so much for having me on the program and talking about at home.
Mark Johnson:Absolutely. First off, we'd like to start these on a more personal level. So we'd like to get to know the individual we're speaking with. So we'd love to know a little bit more about you, you're role at home and maybe a fun fact or a passion you have outside of work Fun?
Susan Rodgers:Great question. So I'm Susan Rodgers. I am the chief marketing officer for at home, and so I lead the team from a marketing perspective at at the at home brand, proud to have been there for what is going on 18 months and so really starting to feel like I, like I'm beyond getting my feet wet, which is really nice. From a personal perspective, I'm married to an IT guy and I have two stepkids a 22 year old stepdaughter, 19 year old stepson and two 10 year old twin daughters. Love them so much, and so we spend a lot of time on the weekends at softball games, volleyball games, and I one of my twin girls is playing youth girls flag football this fall, and she just got named as QB one.
Susan Rodgers:And so she. She's having a lot of fun with that, but honestly, we spend the majority of our weekends on the field somewhere or on the court. So fun fact about me is that I am a huge, passionate college football fan and have been to a ton of college football stadiums 26 and have plans to go to so many more. But at this stage in life I am on the field and on the court with my girls on many, many Saturdays throughout the fall. So in the next stage of life I plan to resume my college football stadium tour.
Mark Johnson:That's good. College football is good. I'm not as passionate about college football, but I do commiserate with the twin things. I have twin girls my, my own just went to college, yes, and one swimming at Bowling Green and one play soccer, so enjoy the oh cool.
Susan Rodgers:Oh, cool yes. So, maybe we'll never be out of the sports thing. I don't know.
Mark Johnson:It seems to go on and on and on, but it a long as you enjoy it with him, it's a great ride. And for those who may not be familiar with at home, can you give us history of at home what you guys do?
Susan Rodgers:Yes, yeah, we're honestly a young brand More nine years old we used but we were originated in 1979 under the name Garden Ridge Pottery, so many, many, many consumers, especially in the south and southeast, might know us by by that name in many markets.
Susan Rodgers:Garden Ridge started in Texas and in South Texas, grew to about 50 stores or so under the name Garden Ridge, and then, in 2000 and 12, lee Bird, our current CEO, joined the organization and transform the brand in 2014 to the name at home and really gave the entire fleet that we had at that time a facelift and formulated a brand that's really carried us to to, honestly, where we are right now, and so we're really, really proud to be a value player in the home decor space, bringing bringing life to home for for those that that maybe can't and don't want to shop at a really really high end, stuffy home decor retailer. So, again, at Home became our name in 2014. And so we'll celebrate our tenure anniversary next month with the brand name At Home and, yeah, have 267 stores, but really focused on growth and on the future continuing to take market share.
Mark Johnson:Excellent, that's great. I mean, we talked about this a little bit. The At Home space is challenging for some competitors right, we sent Bankruptcy and another brand took their name. How are you seeing so much success in what you're doing? What are you guys doing differently that makes you so successful?
Susan Rodgers:Yeah, well, what I would say first is that we always start with a customer.
Susan Rodgers:We're really, really passionate about our customer. We call her lovingly the restless refresher. It's a customer that is sort of like always browsing, always being inspired, always shopping, no matter what platform she's on and no matter if she's in an in-store environment or looking online, and so we love our restless refresher and we've really found success over the last 10 years, really since becoming At Home, by really being focused on the customer and the value proposition of the brand. We know we have large stores, so the number one thing that we're able to offer our customer is really being focused on selection and selection across style, across rooms, across budgets, across seasons, and so really always being focused on selection and making sure that our customer can literally find anything and everything that she might want for her home outside of really large appliances at At Home. So focused on the customer, focused on selection, focused on the value that we provide to the customer, so always being unbeatably priced and always offering the best price that we can for the consumer were focused on that day in and day out.
Mark Johnson:Excellent your insider perks loyalty program. Can you just overview the program how it was constructed, what it does, who it does it for, how the members engage with the program.
Susan Rodgers:Definitely. And I know that we sort of got connected, mark, because of the fact that we just celebrated 15 million participants in the program. So we're pretty, pretty proud of how it's grown over six years. So the program is really a way for us to be able to connect with our consumer and offer that consumer more benefits than non-loyalty program members receive. So we offer what we call flash fines or special pricing on products. Every single week, day in and day out, our members receive member pricing on select products throughout the store.
Susan Rodgers:We provide our consumer our insider perks member early access to Black Friday, early access to fall going on seasonal savings, early access to Halloween, going on seasonal savings, and so all of our members receive better pricing on seasonal product and many other products that non-members don't. And they're the first to hear about exclusive new private brands, exclusive launches with collaborations and celebrities, and so that's fun for them. We are always focused on our return policy because we want to make sure that consumers feel safe in trying out new products and being expired and taking it home and making sure that it works for their home and in their space, and so we're focused on having a best in class return policy for everybody and our insider perks members actually get better, a better return policy than anyone else, and so no receipt is not a problem. We want customers to feel excited to revisit and return and shop for more if they so choose, and so our insider perks members actually get 90 days to return product, even if it's seasonal. So really, really, really great customer experience and return program.
Mark Johnson:Excellent. You talked about some of the benefits of the insider perks program Early access, a lot of surprise and delight opportunities.
Susan Rodgers:Gift with purchases?
Mark Johnson:yeah, yeah, great opportunities to engage the customers. How are those creating extra value, extra engagement opportunities for your consumers?
Susan Rodgers:Yeah, we're always focused on the number one reason why a customer should shop that week, because we do know that our customers always looking and always browsing, always popping in and just trying to source inspiration for herself or for something that she might want to think about for the future.
Susan Rodgers:And so we really try to make sure that we're providing our customer every single week a reason to shop and a reason to return. And so those member only prices on certain flash finds we call them or certain items throughout the store. They pulse in and out, and so one week it might be this week, as an example it's special pricing on Halloween pillows and Halloween doormats, and next week it's going to be something completely different, and the week after it's something completely different, and then we'll have a gift with purchase for that customer. So it's really about always making sure that our customer knows number one, about the great reason to shop that week and just to pop into it at home. But also it's about making sure that they feel special and valued, making sure that they understand what the member pricing is. It's right there when you walk in the store, on the flash find table, so it's not even hard to find. So our stores are really, really big and we know that, so we try to make it as easy for the customer as possible.
Mark Johnson:Absolutely. That's great. I know your program has had a lot of success, recently Passing 15 million. Customers voted the best. I want the best loyalty programs by Newsweek in 21 and 22. Yeah, what can you attribute to the success of the program?
Susan Rodgers:Yeah, I mean I think I've going to just play on something that I said, but we really do stay focused on what the customer wants from us all the time, even in member pricing. If we see that certain flash finds like I mentioned that we call them aren't driving customer engagement, customers aren't seeing value from them, we won't do that one again. So we'll make sure that in every single case, we're listening to the customer and just continuing to make sure that we're providing that customer value. Also, we're always trying to make sure that we're sourcing the best deals for the customer, and so it's our insider perks members that really drive us day in and day out to make sure that we're providing great value across the board.
Mark Johnson:Excellent. Ok, when you look at the data and the feedback you get from the customers, how did you leverage that to create such an amazing program?
Susan Rodgers:Yeah.
Susan Rodgers:So the great news is that on every single transaction, every single receipt a customer, when a customer is an insider perks member, they have an opportunity to say this is what I love today about the experience, this is what I didn't necessarily love.
Susan Rodgers:And so we go through the love. And then we go through the not so love and we really listen to the customer and say, oh gosh, she had a hard time finding this flash find, she had a hard time finding this category in the store even, and so we're constantly mining the customer feedback. We have a social team that's incredibly dedicated and focused to making sure that we're going through every single social comment as well, and so we stay focused, like really in-depth focused, on making sure that we're listening to the customer and we're really passionate about making sure that we're constantly optimizing the experience for her. We run a very low labor model store and so really our labor is dedicated to making sure that the shopping experience is being listened to and as easy as possible, to make sure that we keep the customers that we have and find new ones too.
Mark Johnson:That's awesome. I know you work with Synchrony on your insider program from a program you're probably offering. How does that work? Can you share a little bit more with how that partnership works to bring extra value to the customers and how At Home is looking at partnerships in general?
Susan Rodgers:Yeah. So, as anyone might imagine, a pretty large percentage of our business is done in categories that not everybody has access to on a day in and day out basis. They may be waiting for their next paycheck saving up for a while, and so we want to make sure that all of our customers feel empowered to bring their best home and bring it to life, and so we really want to make sure that we're offering easy access to certain financing opportunities with our co-branded credit card to make sure that everybody feels empowered to make their house a home. And so our Synchrony credit card and that partnership and that relationship allows us to to bring a great co-branded credit card to life and private-label credit card to life and give customers really easy access, great approval ratings across the board and really easy access to make sure that they have access to and open to buy to help them make sure that they can bring that best rug that they really are craving and love, make sure that they can bring that home.
Susan Rodgers:Furniture is really important to customers, and so it's really important that we make sure that we're bringing them special financing options with no payments and interest and things like that. And then we've also recently partnered with Synchrony by NowPay Later and their program as well. So that is both enabled on our website and it's also enabled in our stores. Not everybody knows this. It's pretty new and it's a little bit revolutionary from a store experience perspective. But customers can even sign up in stores for by Now Pay Later. Typically it's sort of an online value proposition only, but it's enabled in our stores and so you can easily apply, easily be accepted and easily have open to buy at the register to make sure that customers feel like they can get what they want and take it home that day.
Mark Johnson:That's awesome If you could ask a competitor, or maybe a marquee brand, one question about their customer loyalty program, their process, and what question would that be?
Susan Rodgers:Yes, you know. A couple of programs come to mind. Number one I've been a loyal DSW elite member for a very long time, loved their gift with Purchase program as a piece of their loyalty program, and so they have absolutely figured out a way to operationalize that online, which is fantastic. One question I would ask them is how they operationalize gift with Purchase for their online consumer, how they bring that to life, because right now our gift with Purchase is an in-store program only. And then Panera Bread just love their loyalty program and the fact that they really seem to know me and get me and offer me special incentives to come in and eat way too much Panera. All of their offerings seem really tailored to my taste buds and would love to understand how they continue to mine and refine customer data to make sure that they're always offering me my favorite bagel or my favorite pick two. And would love to just continue to understand how other great brands are playing in the space as well, especially with personalized offers.
Mark Johnson:Absolutely, and you kind of touched on a little bit. What brands do you admire or are you loyal to?
Susan Rodgers:from a customer's loyalty perspective, yeah, Well, it's probably a little bit of a cop out answer, but the juggernaut in the space is obviously Amazon Prime, and it's really because they have almost their brand is almost synonymous with their loyalty program. I am almost certain that their sales penetration rate of their loyalty program for their brand is probably upwards of 90%, and what they have been able to do in offering every day, day in and day out, value to the customer and it's really centered around convenience is truly remarkable in what they've been able to do from what was once just a bookseller to now. Their selection is obviously passed across multiple categories and playing in all sorts of spaces and even from a digital media perspective, and so they're obviously the juggernaut in the space. But again, my Panera program is it's pretty killer in my mind.
Mark Johnson:So that's awesome. And last question, before the rapid fire questions what can Loyalty 360 do to help you and your team with your custom loyalty program?
Susan Rodgers:Oh gosh, shop shop. In some cases and for many, many sort of verticals within retail, the macro environment is, it's a little bit of an interesting one right now. I won't call it tough, but I won't call it easy. And so, for many cases, for many consumers and in many cases consumers are finding it hard to buy right now, especially in non-discretionary categories. And so, as we continue to move towards the holiday season, shop, shop where you can shop, when you can shop local. Shop your favorite home decor store that brings great selection to life. And so, as we move towards holiday and as we move towards Halloween, just know that Halloween is going fast at home, and so we're sort of known for our Halloween. It's truly remarkable what we have in store right now and what we'll have in store for Christmas. So shop, shop, shop.
Mark Johnson:Excellent. So now we have the infamous rapid fire questions. First off, what is your favorite word?
Susan Rodgers:I really not from a customer facing perspective, but I really love the word ingenious. I almost actually had it as a customer facing word a few years ago when I worked for a different brand. But I love the ingenuity of ingenious and kind of the ingenuity that it sparks within people.
Mark Johnson:Okay, what's your least favorite word?
Susan Rodgers:I think my least favorite word is can't or cannot. Yeah, it's just, it's sort of a no go.
Mark Johnson:It's actually reading a reading book, a sidebar, real quick. But magic words by an author from Penn, Jenna Berger, came out yesterday, wrote a number of books on behavioral science and there's a big chapter in there between can't and don't, so always use don't.
Susan Rodgers:Okay yeah, perfect yeah. Great, great example.
Mark Johnson:I'm going to go read that book, yeah, because my wife told me to do it. I can't do it because my kids right, I don't eat donuts, I don't Right.
Susan Rodgers:I'm choosing to do something else Control Absolutely. Yeah.
Mark Johnson:Yeah, what excites you?
Susan Rodgers:Oh gosh, I know I've said this and it's going to sound so cheesy, but I'll say two things. One home decor, big home decor fan. But then number two, customer research and customer insights really excites me. Figuring out, kind of like, what makes the consumer In my case, in many cases it's a woman, but what makes the consumer tick.
Mark Johnson:Okay, what word do you find tiresome? What do you find tiresome?
Susan Rodgers:Yeah, I would have to say when executive teams can't or don't align, can't or don't, when there's a lot of back and forth across leadership, it's really important that leadership be lost at holding hands really inspired by each other. When they're not, it is tiresome for all teams. So I appreciate leadership teams that walk alongside each other and carry each other's torches.
Mark Johnson:That's awesome. What truly makes a house a home?
Susan Rodgers:I love this At home. At home makes a house a home. No, without being cheesy, family Whether it be those that come from afar or those that live right across the street, or friends that you call family that makes a house a home.
Mark Johnson:Okay, what profession other than the one you have now would have you liked to attempt if you weren't a chief marketing officer?
Susan Rodgers:Oh gosh Again. Sounds so cheesy, sounds like I'm totally playing to my space. But interior decorator slash HGTV production. What a fun, fun, fun job.
Mark Johnson:Okay, and what profession would you avoid at all costs?
Susan Rodgers:Oh gosh, you know what? The hardest job I ever had was being a waitress and trying to read between the lines of what people did and didn't want. And one time I served some salmon to somebody and they said where's my ketchup with my salmon? And I was like I wouldn't even put those two things together. So being a waitress is really hard. I tip well, because it's a tough job.
Mark Johnson:That's good. Who inspired you to become the person you are today?
Susan Rodgers:Oh, such a good question. My grandfather, my grandfather, ran a grocery store in a tiny, tiny, tiny town in Texas Only grocery store for, you know 60 miles, or something like that and he absolutely inspired me as it relates to retail. He absolutely inspired me as it relates to work ethic, and so my grandfather absolutely.
Mark Johnson:That's awesome, and what do you typically think about at the end of the day?
Susan Rodgers:My team, Every day, every minute. My team. How do I make things better, easier, clearer for them?
Mark Johnson:Absolutely my team, and what do you want to be remembered, or how do you want to be remembered by your friends and family?
Susan Rodgers:Gosh guys, these are good questions. I would hope to be remembered as a positive, optimistic person, always trying to find the best in people and be inspired by the best in people, and a person that really like doesn't back down from a challenge and wants to be challenged by her customer. If a customer tells me, do it this way instead, I might ask why, but at the end of the day, it really is all about the customer that we serve, and so I would want to be remembered by my friends, family and coworkers as somebody that rises to the challenge in an optimistic way and always trying to do the best thing for everybody.
Mark Johnson:That's awesome. Well, susan, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today, absolutely, and getting to know you and a little bit more about the At Home and At Home program. So thank you very much.
Susan Rodgers:Thank you, mark, it was really nice chatting with you.
Mark Johnson:Absolutely, and thank you, everyone else, for taking the time to listen today. Make sure you join us again for another edition of our Leaders in Customer Loyalty Series. Until then have a wonderful day.