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Turn your staff into brand ambassadors
The new Best Buy store, which opened in November 2009 on New York City's Union Square, looks like any other big-box electronics retailer. The 48,000-square-foot space is festooned with displays of every imaginable form of squeaking, gibbering, clicking gadget. Take a closer look, however, and you'll find some unusual touches.
This is the only Best Buy, out of more than 1,000 in the US, to stay open all night, a nod to the city's 24-hour culture. The store's general manager, Amy Adoniz, can be seen thumbing her mobile, using Twelpforce, Best Buy's new Twitter service, to talk to customers in places like Spain and Brazil, who like to check in with her before they jet into town. "I'm usually helping one of our foreign customers put a Flip or a netbook on hold for when they come in," Adoniz says.
Half the salespeople are women, a conscious bid to attract more female customers to the geeky male world of consumer electronics. "One of the best things the stores in New York did was offer these designer laptop bags," says Adoniz, 42, as she fingers a cream-coloured Dooney & Bourke valise. "We can't keep them on the shelves."
Innovation takes many forms. At Best Buy it's as simple as a giant retailer finding ways to make its 165,000 employees a major part of its brand, by turning them into ambassadors who help Best Buy respond quickly to the needs of its millions of customers. In recent years, Best Buy has refocused itself from relying on selection as a selling point to focusing on customer service. "Basic retail strategy can be defined as, 'Here is my box, come shop in it,'" says Scot Ciccarelli, a retail analyst for RBC Capital Markets in New York. "Best Buy has decided to find ways to customise its store locations to the local population."
This new strategy, which began in 2006, isn't easy for a corporation of Best Buy's scale to implement. Adoniz says the company accomplishes it through a relentless emphasis on communication. Employees at all levels are encouraged to talk to customers and take what they learn to corporate HQ in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Adoniz cites three recent examples where suggestions from employees changed the way local stores do business.
Employees in Chicago noticed that customers in a heavily Polish neighborhood wanted more Polish music. Now the store stocks a full range. Employees at a Tampa location decided to entice the many area retirees into the store with free morning coffee and doughnuts. Adoniz says she herself was part of an effort to install free concierge desks to assist the many foreign and out of town tourist shoppers who frequent Best Buys in New York City.
Twelpforce, which began in July 2009, is emblematic of this approach. It's open to all Best Buy employees, who may sign onto it at any time and field questions from customers. Today, there are more than 16,500 customers regularly communicating with Best Buy employees through tweets. Best Buy also has an active intranet with social networking sites and personal web pages; Adoniz uses her own webpage to write about her love of travel, among other things.
Employees are encouraged to attend forums, where big picture issues like company strategy and earnings are discussed. According to Adoniz, these forums are quite popular.
If it all seems kind of gimmicky, consider this. Best Buy has gone from a nine per cent market share in 1985 to 22 per cent, while rivals like CompUSA and Circuit City have died. Christian Buss, who covers retail for investment bank Thomas Weisel Partners, says that since 1999 Best Buy per-store sales are up 42 per cent as opposed to 26 per cent for all electronics retailers. Best Buy's overall growth during that time is 197 per cent. And the company plans to open its first British store in Thurrock in Essex this spring. "They have found a way to stay on top of the changes in consumer demand," Buss says, "and react to them."
Oh, and being open all night, has paid off for the Union Square store. Recently, Amy Adoniz sold a 42-inch flat-screen television to a young woman at 2.45am. "I asked her why she was shopping so late," Adoniz recalls, "She told me she wanted to avoid the crowds."
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
