BI: Has doubling down on the omni-channel approach changed who your core customer is at all?
Smith: I think it's solidified our core customers. One of the things Jerri and her team did was build a center of analytics and excellence. We took our 14 different analytics teams and combined them into one. We had, I think, 49 different pools and we were putting that together.
We really started tracking customer retention. Are our customers growing or not? That hadn't been done before at Office Depot. The good news is our customer base is growing, and one of our biggest assets that very few people understand is we have almost 28.8 million customers.
When I go out and talk to my former tech buddies in Silicon Valley, they always go, "Wow, that's a huge asset, Gerry. How do you go off and monetize that?" Well, how we do that is through our business services platform, our Workonomy strategy.
Jerri and her digital marketing team plus our other two channels have done a really good job of going back and reactivating customers through digital marketing-type of capabilities, whether it's email, whether it's PLA, LIA, all these different types of higher returns on marketing investments that really allow us to go back to longtime Office Depot customers, and get them excited to come back to the store or, very, very importantly, online, or through our B2B segments.
They get re-engaged with us. And so on a very frequent basis I'm engaging those teams on looking at our customer trends. Are we growing? And let's deal with all the engines and vehicles we have to go off and get that business going, because the most important asset I have long-term is my customer base.
Why we have Workonomy is to really leverage that customer base and that world-class supply chain and then provide services and products to people.
My vision is that Office Depot doesn't provide just office products, or just tech services with our Compucom acquisition. I want to go partner with people who can bring an array of products to companies because we want to own that customer relationship, we want to give them a great experience, and, most importantly, we want them to grow.
We're testing a co-working space in Los Gatos, California. It's had tremendous success since we've opened I think about 90 days ago. In fact, we're going out for a grand opening next Tuesday and we're really excited about that.
What it's shown is people want a community. Smalls businesses want a community. We think that because of our unique omni-channel approach, we can be that company that provides that for people.