Home Depot Inc., the largest home-improvement chain in the U.S., is waiting to see if its latest attempt to improve customer service pays off.

All 300,000 employees took a mandatory crash course in helping customers earlier this year. The company also is on a two-year push to improve merchandising and modernize distribution. The goal is to cultivate happier shoppers who buy more paint and power tools.

“If we do this correctly, we’re going to be able to have a positive impact on our transactions,” said Marvin Ellison, Home Depot’s executive vice president for U.S. stores, in an interview at the company’s Atlanta headquarters. “The numbers have to bear that out. We’re in the process of hoping that they will.”

In the University of Michigan’s customer satisfaction survey, Home Depot comes in last place among specialty retailers. Any plan to improve will have to overcome economic challenges, said Laura Champine, an analyst with Cowen & Co. in New York. The recession is in its 17th month, and the U.S. housing market is in its worst slump since the Great Depression. Home Depot forecasts a 9 percent sales drop in 2009. “It’s really tough to drive better customer service when you can launch a cannon ball down the aisles,” Champine said.

Colin McGranahan, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., said much of the sales decline is a function of housing turnover, store traffic and fewer big-ticket purchases.

“You don’t turn a ship as big as Home Depot in a quarter,” he said. “It takes a year or two.”

Home Depot’s new drive to restore service is being led by Ellison and Chief Executive Officer Frank Blake, who took over after Robert Nardelli was ousted in 2007. A year prior to that, Nardelli started a program called “Orange Juiced,” which set aside $30 million to reward stores and workers who gave good customer service. It was later abandoned.

Ellison, who reports to Blake and has overseen Home Depot’s approximately 1,970 U.S. stores since August, wants his managers to ignore recession news and stay focused on honing store operations.

“We have to be as flawless as possible on the things we control,” Ellison, 44, said in the interview last month.

Starting in January, Home Depot instituted its two- to three-hour course on customer service basics. Cashiers, for example, learned that if their checkout line is empty, they are to go find a customer waiting in another line and ring up their order.

Workers gathering shopping carts in the parking lot are required to assist customers hauling bulky purchases to their cars. Associates restocking shelves also are supposed to help customers.

Training wrapped up last month. Ellison said the effect of that re-education was noticeable on internal customer satisfaction surveys within a week.

Quinn White, 31, is a contractor building an Irish pub in midtown Atlanta. He said he shops at Home Depot about five times a week. A recent visit was for paint and rolls of a liner that goes underneath hardwood flooring.

“The service is definitely better,” he said. “You walk in and there’s people there and as you’re shopping there’s people all over the place actively asking you if you need directions.”

His co-worker, Stuart Sellers, 44, has been less impressed.

“It’s full of enthusiastic amateurs,” he said.

Ellison also instituted a program called “Power Hours,” which freed workers from restocking shelves and other duties for four hours mid-day to focus on customers. Store managers used to have to sift through about 200 sales and employee reports on Monday mornings. Now they have about a dozen.

There are some hints of success. Fourth-quarter sales in U.S. locations open at least a year outperformed those of Lowe’s Cos. That’s Home Depot’s first such win over its Mooresville, N.C.-based rival in about five years. Gross margins, or the percentage of sales left after stripping out the cost of goods sold, also outperformed Lowe’s in the quarter.

In the latest quarter, the first quarter, net income rose 44 percent to $514 million, or 30 cents a share, from a year earlier after the company trimmed selling, general and administrative costs.

Local creativity might be fostered by a new regional distribution system, which helps managers stock shelves with products tailored to their store’s customers, according to Ellison. The regional system makes it easier for lower-volume stores to keep items in stock by eliminating order minimums.

“This is a pretty wicked machine when we get our swagger back,” said J.T. Rieves, who oversees about 120 stores in the southeast. “I’m as excited as I’ve ever been in 20 years.”