Macy’s One Account

Website: Macys.com and Bloomingdales.com account page

Problem: Frequently customers on both Macys.com and Bloomingdales.com were forgetting their passwords that were associated with their email addresses when they logged in. They then tried to reset their passwords, however, if they couldn’t remember their email address they couldn’t retrieve their password and would therefor lose all their information. This was obviously a very bad customer experience as they would then have to create a new account and essentially start over. This also made it difficult for our Marketing Team as we had some 3 million+ accounts that were inactive and they were spending money on promotional emails which were basically going nowhere. Customers were also calling into Macy’s Customer Service Center, however, the agents would have difficulty locating their account which would result in additional loss of revenue due to time spent on the phone with customers.

Hypothesis: If we built out the ability to tie in their account with their mobile phone number, which people keep for years and usually keep the same phone number, and we allow the customer to enter that number into their account, then we can tie all of it back to One Account, hence the name.

Solution: Since this required very little UI development, I teamed up with the backend Dev Team to figure out how this very complex solution would work. We identified the database that housed all customer information and then came up with a solution whereby we would implement the ability to link accounts to their phone. This could all be done via the websites. However, we had to figure out a solution for when our customers called in. So I then worked with the Macy’s Customer Service Team and their systems to allow for a new field on the agent’s terminal where the agent can enter the mobile phone or email and from there do a search to find the customers’ account and tie it all together. Finally, I worked with the Stores Sales Team to update the POS with a similar feature so that customers could tie all their accounts to their phone right at the register.

Results: One Account was able to synch close to 5 million Macy’s and 3 million Bloomingdale’s accounts immediately. We were able to reduce password reset requests by more than 25% and we saw a call reduction into Customer Service by close to 20%, thereby saving the company close to $2 million in savings.