Best Buy Canada boosts customer experience ratings by building stronger relationships.

Best Buy Canada is Canada’s largest and most successful consumer electronics retailer, helping Canadians equip their homes with the latest technology and entertainment solutions. It’s the country’s most popular multichannel retailer with more than 280 million visits in-store and online each year. More than 80% of customer visits are digital.

Best Buy Canada needs to keep differentiating its offerings to stay competitive in the dynamic retail and technology market. It’s already embracing artificial intelligence as part of its Assured Living initiative, which allows elderly people to live independently longer by leveraging smart technology. “Smart devices, such as a fridge or a seat sensor, can reveal a lot about a person’s habits,” said Hay-Sabourin, Senior Vice President of Ecommerce and Technology at Best Buy Canada. “We can use this information to alert caregivers and family members if their routine changes sufficiently to raise concern.” 

Services such as Assured Living are increasingly becoming part of Best Buy Canada’s portfolio as it pursues its mission to enrich lives through technology. This shift requires a new approach to managing customer relationships. “We used to be a transactional business; we would sell a product and move on,” said Hay-Sabourin. “Today we’re focused on building long-lasting relationships with our customers and serving them on whatever channel they choose.”

Salesforce has been key to enabling this relationship-driven approach. As Greg Irvine, Senior Product Owner at Best Buy Canada, said: “With Salesforce, we can serve our customers before and after a transaction, allowing us to put the customer at the center of our business, creating a connected, higher valued experience across customer touchpoints.”

To keep delivering a great experience as customer relationships evolve and its offerings expand, Best Buy Canada needs to understand its customers. “We want to deliver a more personalized service consistently across different customer engagement channels, so we can anticipate and respond to their changing needs,” said Hay-Sabourin.

Best Buy Canada’s personalization efforts began with the deployment of Marketing Cloud in 2017 followed by deploying Service Cloud to 600 customer service agents in 2018. “With Service Cloud, the team can share knowledge and follow up cases more easily,” said Hay-Sabourin. “We want customers to be happy after their first contact.” And they are: Best Buy’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) has gone up 10% year-over-year since 2017.

The first-call resolution rate has also increased by 16% year-over-year in the same period. With Service Cloud, customer service agents have visibility into interactions across all channels, including phone, chat, and email. Every additional contact presents Best Buy Canada with a new opportunity to deepen the relationship.

“When customers provide feedback on their experience with Best Buy, we can use this to tailor future conversations,” said Irvine. “The better the experience, the more advocates we have to help promote our brand and increase our share of voice.”

Best Buy Canada has also transformed how its Geek Squad engages with customers. This 500-member-strong support team helps customers with installations, repairs, and technical support. To ensure it can manage these appointments effectively, Geek Squad uses Field Service Lightning. Customers are updated automatically of any schedule changes. The ability to use this application on mobile devices is a significant benefit for Geek Squad agents.

“With Field Service Lightning, we can optimize the efficiency of the team and improve the accuracy of when an agent is due to visit a customer,” said Irvine. “There are now fewer manual processes for our Geek Squad agents, which means they can spend more time helping customers resolve their technical issues.”

The Geek Squad also uses LogMeIn, a Salesforce AppExchange solution, to enable remote access and diagnostics on customer devices. 

As Best Buy Canada seeks to deepen customer relationships, it needs to ensure it doesn’t overwhelm people with too much information. With Marketing Cloud, it can take a centralized approach to sequencing and prioritizing customer communications. Emails can be personalized based on customers’ interests, previous purchases, support requests, and Geek Squad engagements.

“With Marketing Cloud, we can send more relevant customer communications and at the right frequency,” said Hay-Sabourin. “It ensures different teams are not sending conflicting messages.” 

As Best Buy Canada deepens its assortment authority in technology products and expands into new categories, such as luggage and sports, it needs to grow its online Marketplace, which provides customers with access to products from other sellers. “Marketplace is a locomotive of growth for us on digital channels,” said Hay-Sabourin.

Best Buy Canada manages Marketplace leads via Sales Cloud, which has helped to boost conversion rates and unlock new insights. “Leads used to be tracked on a spreadsheet with limited insights into the prospect,” said Irvine. “With Sales Cloud, we can empower the business development team with the information they need to convert more leads into Marketplace accounts. It also helps to automate key processes, which boosts productivity and improves lead follow-up times.”

The information captured in Sales Cloud enables Best Buy Canada to deepen its relationship with Marketplace sellers and provide them with a better experience. Best Buy wants to extend this further by creating an online sellers’ community for sharing sales tips and onboarding information. “We want to keep growing Marketplace with more sellers and products to wow our customers,” said Hay-Sabourin. “With Community Cloud, we can encourage crowd learning across Marketplace.”

Success for Best Buy Canada is not only about improving customer and seller engagement; the business also wants to empower its 12,000 employees — regardless of whether they work in one of its 175 stores, the head office, or in the field. “At Best Buy we’ve adopted an agile mindset which has helped us take a user-centric strategy that drives the employee experience on the Salesforce platform. All our development is iterative, collaborative and user-focused allowing us to increase the adoption of the platform and provide an exceptional experience for our employees,” said Irvine.

Hundreds of people at Best Buy Canada now use Trailhead to learn how they can leverage Salesforce to transform processes and tap into new insights. With customers, employees, and sellers all benefiting from a richer experience, Best Buy Canada can focus on bringing new services and products to market. “With Salesforce, we can enrich more people’s lives with technology. It enables us to work faster, and have smarter conversations with our customers,” said Hay-Sabourin.