Best Buy has its own house brands like Dynex and Rocketfish so they have some experience working with outsourced product development but I think there's a bigger opportunity to transform the Best Buy experience. The biggest strengths of BB is that they're a well known brand with supplier connections with every major CE company in the business along with a large network of stores which in many cases are positioned in very good areas with high visibility and good accessibility. On the downside, they have a reputation for having poor customer service and the appearance of having incompetent workers turns a lot of high value customers off. Here's what I would do if I were Best Buy:
1) Trim the workforce and focus on service - Your biggest asset is that when anything goes wrong, just come back into Best Buy and you'll take care of it. This is not easy for online channels to replicate especially when shipping costs continue to rise and it's a hassle to box and ship a 60" LCD TV back.
2) Move away from a SKU focused experience - Given most of Best Buy's customers are probably in the middle-America, slightly older, demographic, I'm surprised that they just put things on shelves and expect people to know how to pick/find the right item. This forces people to rely on the Blue Shirts which in many cases results in a negative experience (see Louis CK show about Blue Shirts). Instead, I would transform the store into an Ikea showroom like experience where people SEE, EXPERIENCE, PLAY with all of the technology and see how it's applied in real life. This would also reduce the number of salespeople you need milling around.
3) Reduce SKUs - BB is never going to have as many SKUs as Amazon so I would focus on carrying a more curated set of products at a few logical price points. This could lead to easier support and help the Blue Shirts develop more expertise since they don't have to know hundreds of products.
That's right along the lines of a possibility I've considered for BBY myself.
It would be amusing to see BBY become a champion of customer service with a curated selection as I feel like they were a major force in promoting price and selection over service in the first place.
>Your biggest asset is that when anything goes wrong, just come back into Best Buy and you'll take care of it.
One of the things that permanently soured me on BBY several years ago was seeing an elderly woman about to break into tears arguing with a manager over the "service plan" for her TV. The manager was explaining that she wasn't entitled to a replacement unless BBY spent longer than 45 days trying to fix the one she purchased. Apparently, it had only been 42 days at the time of the argument.
Comments
Best Buy has its own house brands like Dynex and Rocketfish so they have some experience working with outsourced product development but I think there's a bigger opportunity to transform the Best Buy experience. The biggest strengths of BB is that they're a well known brand with supplier connections with every major CE company in the business along with a large network of stores which in many cases are positioned in very good areas with high visibility and good accessibility. On the downside, they have a reputation for having poor customer service and the appearance of having incompetent workers turns a lot of high value customers off. Here's what I would do if I were Best Buy:
1) Trim the workforce and focus on service - Your biggest asset is that when anything goes wrong, just come back into Best Buy and you'll take care of it. This is not easy for online channels to replicate especially when shipping costs continue to rise and it's a hassle to box and ship a 60" LCD TV back.
2) Move away from a SKU focused experience - Given most of Best Buy's customers are probably in the middle-America, slightly older, demographic, I'm surprised that they just put things on shelves and expect people to know how to pick/find the right item. This forces people to rely on the Blue Shirts which in many cases results in a negative experience (see Louis CK show about Blue Shirts). Instead, I would transform the store into an Ikea showroom like experience where people SEE, EXPERIENCE, PLAY with all of the technology and see how it's applied in real life. This would also reduce the number of salespeople you need milling around.
3) Reduce SKUs - BB is never going to have as many SKUs as Amazon so I would focus on carrying a more curated set of products at a few logical price points. This could lead to easier support and help the Blue Shirts develop more expertise since they don't have to know hundreds of products.
That's right along the lines of a possibility I've considered for BBY myself.
It would be amusing to see BBY become a champion of customer service with a curated selection as I feel like they were a major force in promoting price and selection over service in the first place.
>Your biggest asset is that when anything goes wrong, just come back into Best Buy and you'll take care of it.
One of the things that permanently soured me on BBY several years ago was seeing an elderly woman about to break into tears arguing with a manager over the "service plan" for her TV. The manager was explaining that she wasn't entitled to a replacement unless BBY spent longer than 45 days trying to fix the one she purchased. Apparently, it had only been 42 days at the time of the argument.