Home Depot Revamps Customer Service StrategyHome Depot Revamps Customer Service Strategy

Home Depot Inc. is undertaking a little home improvement project of its own this summer. It's fixing up its IT house with new contracts for supply-chain and customer-relationship-management technology.

The company Tuesday confirmed that it will use Avaya Inc.'s Interaction Management system as the core technology in its new customer service strategy, which will divert customer calls from local stores to centralized call center operations.

The first Home Depot call center is scheduled to open in September in Tampa, Fla., and eventually employ up to 1,000 agents. It will handle calls for all stores in the company's southern division, which includes Florida and southern Alabama. Avaya technology will link the call-center agents with information on approximately a million products in more than 1,200 stores, and with store-based databases that include everything from delivery and installation schedules to tool rentals and promotional events, says Information Services senior manager Ed Buter.

The company on Monday also confirmed that it has signed an enterprise license agreement to use CommerceQuest Inc.'s enableNet Data Integrator and IBM MQ Series middleware to replace its homegrown supply-chain systems. The CommerceQuest system allows the company to transfer bulk files from existing legacy applications to stores and suppliers in real time rather than in batch processing at night.