Geeks at Your Service: Secret of Best Buy's Success

November 17, 2008, 11:55 AM —  CIO.com — 

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 US$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, the company's CIO and the CEO of Best Buy International. Willett, who 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: Tell us a little about the Remote Service Project.

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.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

I like it!
Close

On Twitter now

best buy

Powered by Twitter
You are logged in | Sign out
Sign in and post to Twitter

What are you thinking?

Cancel Tweet sent

On Twitter now

Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
peer-to-peer

jfruh
Apple syncing patent can't come soon enough

pasmith
New Twitter features borrow from 3rd party clients

Esther Schindler
Open Source Changes the Software Acquisition Process

mikelgan
How to set up continuous podcast play on the new iTunes

David Strom
Five important Windows 7 mobility features

sjvn
Guard your Wi-Fi for your own sake                        

Sandra Henry-Stocker
Grepping on Whole Words

 

Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325

Join the conversation here

The Daily Tip

The Daily TipQuick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.

Hot tips:

Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.

Newsletters

Subscribe to ITWORLD TODAY and receive the latest IT news and analysis.

I would like to receive offers via email from ITworld partners.
By clicking submit you agree to the terms and conditions outlined in ITworld's privacy policy.
Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace