Craftsman Uses Data to Improve Their Products
Smart Lawn Equipment Gives Our Client an Edge Over Competitors
Craftsman at Sears, a top seller of tools, lawn, and garden equipment, had two major challenges: low user ratings for the Craftsman Smart Lawn mobile app and limited usefulness from the app data it was collecting. “We have thousands downloading the app, but it only had a 1.5-star rating. We needed to turn that trend around,” said Bob Boyle, Director of Brand Management, Kenmore, Craftsman, and DieHard brands. “We also were missing opportunities in data collection, as well as how to use the data.”
Enter Lab651, experts in connected products and mobile applications. “The app needed technical updates – it looked great, but the back-end programming needed work to enhance the user experience,” company co-founder Justin Grammens noted.
Fixing the app’s back-end programming was just the beginning for Grammens, an application and connectivity expert, and his team at Lab651. “We saw huge potential for Craftsman at Sears to create an interactive and rich user experience.” The app lets users know when their mower needed a new blade, air filter, and oil change, or when the battery was losing its charge. Grammens saw the potential for much more…
More Data Drives Better Business Decisions
The team at Lab651 quickly identified a number of key features that were not working as expected and implemented better authentication and security architecture.
Where Lab651 really exceeded expectations, however, was helping Craftsman at Sears leverage the data already being collected and enabling the app to capture even more data to help create cross-selling opportunities and strengthen customer loyalty. Previously, the only data Craftsman was able to collect was the number of users signed up for the current and prior week.
“We created a dashboard that identifies the top five models purchased by customers who use the app, shows geographic information on where they are located, the performance of the mowers, and how often they are using the equipment,” Grammens said. Lab651 also suggested to Craftsman at Sears that it specifically target power users of the mobile app and pushing notifications to cross-sell products to them. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Grammens said. Craftsman at Sears agrees: “Lab651 really opened my eyes to the possibilities of using all this data we are collecting. They think strategically and help us chart a vision of what we want to offer consumers in the future.”
Another challenge that surfaced as the team strategized with Lab651 was its ability to provide the Craftsman at Sears product management and product development teams in real-time which products are being purchased more often and if there is a correlation to product quality issues. “Right now we work with a wide variety of manufacturers, and we don’t really have a sense of which might have product quality issues,” said Boyle. With the new dashboard, our teams can now track the performance and failure rates of various products, which allows them to make better business decisions going forward.
Craftsman at Sears was able to quickly see results and calculate a positive return on investment. Having the ability to purchase items such as Craftsman lawn mower blades and DieHard batteries being just one click away from the consumer in the app, the increase in sales was measurable.
Helping Companies Access and Use Data Differently
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