18,000+ Geeks at Your Service: The Secret of Best Buy's Success
Best Buy has used information technology to innovate and differentiate itself, and to turn customer service into an art form.
CIO — Great in-store customer service is important, but excellent customer service after you leave, well that stands apart from the crowd. Best Buy has differentiated itself with just that strategy. Through its Remote Service Project, an enterprisewide business-IT system that remotely distributes computer repair, maintenance and other work among the company's more than 10,000 Best Buy Geek Squad Agents (who provide tech support and more), the company was able to boost customer satisfaction long after point-of-sale.
The information technology project began in response to research that made a troubling discovery: Far too many PC buyers were unable to get their computers up and running once they got home, a problem that colored (for the worse) their assessment of Best Buy. The company's response was its Remote Service Project, a strategy targeted at PCs, but which has been extended to home theater systems and more. The Remote Service Project has enabled the company's Geek Squad agents to serve 25 percent more customers and has improved redo rates by 33 percent. On top of that, the company attributes an annual sales increase of $6.2 million to the project. The Remote Service Project was also a standout winner in the CIO 100 competition.
Brian Carlson, CIO.com's Editorial Director, sat down with Bob Willett, CIO of Best Buy and CEO of Best Buy International. Willett talked about why he doesn't use the terms "IT" or "information technology," how business information shops can achieve ambitious projects, and how you can empower your team to innovate.
CIO: How did the Remote Service Project begin?
Willett: The Remote Service Project started with [research] around the customer experience: Once customers bought [a PC], what was their experience when they got home? We decided that one of the key things we had to do was to improve that experience [by minimizing PC] down time.
CIO: How did you approach the Remote Service Project?
Willett: In Best Buy we start our projects based upon feedback from customers and feedback from our employees, and this was no different. We'd launched Geek [Squad], and we wanted to maximize the availability of the 18,000 Geeks. We wanted to improve their productivity, which would improve the service to the customer and improve the time that the consumer had access to their product, so that when their PC went down, instead of losing it for a week to 10 days, we were now [shortening] downtime to 24 hours: That's a massive breakthrough. [The Remote Service Project] also meant that when you go into the store and you want your PC repaired, instead of [having a long wait time because of] that particular store having a backlog of work to do, we now have a remote capability that identifies that backlog and [can assign] the work [to another] store remotely. And so it really means that we can level out the work across the enterprise, but above all, deliver a great experience for the customer and maximize the up time of the capability of the product that they've sourced from us.
