How Lowe's turned SMS into a strategic customer experience platform

When the pandemic hit in 2020, Lowe's faced a challenge that would have been unthinkable just months earlier: digital order volumes doubled almost overnight, and they stayed that way. For Toni Campbell, Senior Manager of Product Management at Lowe's, this surge represented both an opportunity and a fundamental operational problem. Campbell recalls:

During the pandemic, our customers were really looking for other ways to fulfill their orders, to get things to them, and we saw a lot of customers changing to our digital channel. We saw order volumes double during that time period, and those order volumes haven't come down.

The home improvement retailer, which operates over 1,700 stores across North America, suddenly found itself managing unprecedented digital fulfillment complexity. With 60% of orders requiring store pickup and 20% needing truck delivery, the company needed better ways to communicate with customers about their orders without overwhelming ...