Bath & Granite

Sales Management + Customer Experience Design

Project Overview

bathandgranite.comBath & Granite (now CAPO Kitchen & Bath) is a brick and mortar kitchen and bath showroom in Denver, Colorado.

With a 4,000 sq ft showroom, 20,000 sq ft warehouse, and full granite fabrication shop, B&G was positioned for success in Denver's white hot housing market.

The strategies that work well for a small company run into the law of diminishing returns after a certain size and don't allow for scaling up.

The biggest problems B&G faced when I began was process and quality control issues that plague any fast growth company.

My Contributions

Onboarded at B&G as a sales associate and graphic designer, my role quickly expanded to impact projects including a company wide rebrand, showroom redesign, operations processes + manual, and developing and managing a kitchen design department from the ground up.

My efforts took the original Bath & Granite 4 Less brand and moved it from a bargain showroom and elevated it into the mid range custom design home decor market.

During my 2 year tenure, B&G saw growth upwards of 45% each year and yearly sales of over $4 and $6 million respectively while my sales numbers hit $1.5 million in addition to my other duties.

Identifying Problems

Anyone with startup / SME experience can relate...

Inconsistent customer experience. ~30% customer complaint rate upon order fulfillment.
Non-existant branding strategy. Physical and digital branding is sparse and inconsistent.
Product strategy leaves out the highest margin product offerings.
High overhead, high risk business model based on warehousing damage prone product, forcing ~40% of inventory to be sold at a discount.

Our Customer's Journey

An exercise in empathy

It quickly became apparent that our customers were mostly happy with their pre-conversion experience but that the post conversion fulfillment experience left much to be desired.
Main issues revolved around inconsistent product quotes, contractual obligations for both parties, and fulfillment expectations and procedures.
We began narrowing down our high impact objectives by looking at our clientele.

Customer Profiles

60% of Bath & Granite's customers were homeowners who have a contractor who will pickup the vanity and install. These contractors don't have an understanding of our expectations or contract.
30% of customers are weekend warriors or property flippers who know what they are doing, what they want, and don't need anything but a clear and smooth journey from purchase to installation.
Less than 5% were interior designers or decorators, but I identified this category as the a gap in the business strategy. While we experienced a high complaint rate we wouldn't attract many high return rate business, so designers became our aspirational goal.

Employee Handbook & SOPs

LEAN Six Sigma Exercise

Looking inward we identified problems with our employee expectations and training. Many of the customer side problems arose from our employees being spread to thin, improperly trained on customer service, or quality control oversight gaps.
Over several months, we surveyed employees on their departmental procedures, interviewed each about their role and responsibilities and asked how they would do things differently to create a consistent customer experience.
Writing our SOP's were done incrementally. Writing a rough draft, we distributed it with instructions for employee to follow the steps but to also write on it and make suggestions. We had scrum meetings and reviewed these and made quick changes until we had a polished and well regarded set of SOP's that employees abided by and vastly improved our customer complaint rate.
By the end of the SOP project, we reduced our complaint rate from 30% down below 8%. We estimated that this saved us over $500,000 per year in discounts do to damaged product and poor customer service, and increased our sales by at least $1,000,000 the first year.

Kitchen Design Department

New product offerings and pitfalls

Bath & Granite was beginning to offer kitchen countertops when I began with them. After a year of smoothing out the process the next step was a custom kitchen design offering.
Partnering with a cabinet company who warehoused locally, we slowly began selling to the public. Trust building was key as all the professional relationships were new and customers were hesitant to go with a company just starting out.
We were research heavy for several months, I was trained by our cabinet company, became certified, learned the 20/20 design software to properly visualize the end results, and I accompanied several contractors on kitchen installs to understand firsthand how to (and not to) design a kitchen layout.
Over 8 months I sold dozens of kitchen cabinets and developed a Design Consultation sales model that became the blueprint for the rest of the company's sales strategy. My process was to listen, build empathy, document customer needs, and provide options.

Wrap up & Reflection

Lessons I learned

Listen to your customers is the key to growth. The success rate of top down decisions regarding customer experience is very low and ultimately harms all aspects of the business.
Employee's want to provide good service, listening to them is as equally important as customers.
High growth comes from being able to watch trends, turn obstacle into opportunity, and treating people like human beings.
My biggest personal lesson here is I need to document my work. There are so many little actions that go into taking one step in the right direction, let alone finish a marathon. Each step has value not only to a portfolio like this, but to employers, partners, and customers. Storytelling is a pillar of design, documentation is crucial to telling a complete story.