During Tuesday’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call, Joly said he believes a differentiated customer experience can happen at Best Buy.
“We are pursuing a strategy that is focused on delivering advice, service, and convenience at competitive prices to our customers,” Joly said, according to Seeking Alpha. “Within this strategy, we are focused on driving a number of growth initiatives around key product categories, life events, and services. To drive these initiatives, we are pursuing and investing in the transformation of key functions and processes. We will also, in fiscal 2016, be facing industry and economic pressures on our business related to deflationary pricing and weak industry demand in certain product categories that we discussed last quarter.”
There's that new buzzword, customer experience. What I find fascinating is why a market leader like Best Buy hasn't been trying to differentiate customer experience for years? Amazon has clearly hurt their business and low-price alternatives like Walmart have been coming after them for years, why all of the sudden is a differentiated customer experience important now?
I know personally I try to never step foot in a Best Buy. I used to be a very loyal customer, however there were a few experiences that made me so upset, I never went back. These experiences were anti-customer experience moments. They were trying to up sell so hard, it made me uncomfortable, to the fact they were trying to make me feel stupid for not getting the protection plan. As a customer, I didn't like the feeling and stopped going back.
They will have quite the challenge to create a differentiated customer experience in the stores. Their salespeople, in general, have not given me great customer experiences in the past. Whenever I have had the opportunity to engage and ask questions, they have read the stickers and told me what was on their brochure, like I already didn't do that.
What I would like to see in Best Buy is the days of the "old" Home Depot model. Home Depot used to pay its employees top dollar for their expertise. The idea was that a plumber who was tired of working in less than stellar conditions would work at Home Depot and they would be able to give expert advise to customers looking to do home improvement. Over the years, to save payroll, Home Depot went away from this model and most of the staff can't help you with great advise.
If Best Buy softens the sales approach and becomes more of an expertise experience, I could see wanting to shop there again in the future. When I am shopping for a camera, I want the salesperson to be able to tell me about why this camera will be better for me than another camera. I want them to ask me questions and figure out what I need instead of reading off of a price ticket at the features of a camera. This would be a great experience and something Amazon could never match from an online perspective.
The one reason I don't believe this will succeed are the words coming out of the CEO's mouth about this change. He talks about "growth initiatives" which is not a customer-centric way to speak about the business. Customer experience is a culture change, not an initiative.