service design / employee experience
context
Best Buy runs its brick and mortar stores relying completely on the expertise of its store employees - blueshirts, inventory data and understanding what their customers need. As part of a corporate program - store leaders were brought into technology on stretch assignments.
Retail Ops leadership was made aware of technology challenges in the sales cycle and an opportunity to increase sales and democratize information
Year
2012-17
Role
Senior UX Manager, Retail Ops
Goal
Experience definition of sales consultation tool to be used by employees shoulder to shoulder with a customer on a handheld device - deliver information at the speed of a conversation.
Opportunity to influence the experience of 100K+ employees and revenue of over 30 B USD
Challenges
Inconsistent customer experience - dependent on the knowledge of the blue shirt
Disparate “basket” sizes with no way to track conversion - everything was done on paper
Employees depended on several systems for a single transaction and data was inaccurate
approach
research
To get a quick understanding of the state of nation, started with field research. Findings included:
Inaccurate inventory - Data matching bestbuy.com was unavailable; blue shirts wanted to know at minimum what a customer knows about a product
Too many sources of information, mostly pen and paper - no digital integration or tracking or reporting
Mobile sales make the most money
Recommendations and basket size depended on the expertise of the blueshirt
Blue shirt using Workstation, recommendation sheet , and personal device simultaneously to make a sale.
Blueshirt explaining instalment billing during contextual inquiry
Minimum number of touch points per transaction for a blue shirt to complete a saleTo facilitate better a better sales and consultation experience there is a
need to enable digital access to accurate product information and personalized
recommendations based on the customer’s tech ecosystem and purchase patterns.
pilot
Partnered with product and engineering to define MVP. Given this was a net new premise, optimizing cost to outcome was a priority
MVP included
Product Search, Customer and Mobile Lookup
lessons learnt from pilot
Mobile plan and product sales were the biggest business driver but the most complicated to enable from an experience and tech POV.
This key function was inhibiting adoption in the field.
Additionally business models shifted from contracts to instalments
Designs for the work flow were put through multiple quick iterations and testing to match vendor timelines
iteration 2 - pilot + mobile plans
launch nation wide
In the first year, the application was deployed over 6500 tablets and was recorded to have highest number of product lookups over 5 million in a single holiday period.
““The use of CoreBlue increases my store’s profitability” ”
““I don’t know why you would want to use anything else, it’s so easy” ”
impact
Increase in revenue, growth in units/transaction, increase in close rates /user
Paper process elimination of Best Buy retail and Geek Squad through human centered design of retail applications
Reduction or elimination of employee software training through human centered design of retail applications
JD Power Appliances Award - Contributor to industry leading Home Delivery Experience - 50-70% reduction in employee task time.
Design patterns and services established were re-enforced through other retail applications
3x increase
revenue/transaction
2x increase
units/transaction
50-70% decrease
employee task time
8% increase
close rate/employee
product evolution and continuous delivery
We worked on this product for the next 2 years and crafted the experience over several sprints. As a result the application grew from a 3 screen MVP to a full fledged one with order management capability,
