As a leader in delivering award-winning omnichannel retail in Canada, Best Buy Canada is driven by its obsession with the customer experience, because what matters to its customers matters to the retailer.

Today’s customers want a retail experience that frees rather than confines them, and they expect more personalized service, greater interactivity with products, and a seamless experience no matter whether they choose to shop in-store, online, or on their phones. Best Buy’s “Total Retail” approach delivers on these expectations by listening to customer feedback, leveraging consumer insights, and meeting customers’ needs throughout their entire shopping journey.

In 2017, Best Buy launched 13 of its brand new experience stores in key markets across the country. Consumer insights revealed that today’s customers get inspired about the possibilities of technology and increasingly look for physical spaces to interact with products on the market, and these stores deliver by offering unprecedented levels of interactivity and design.

Key, innovative features included: New, one-of-a-kind fixtures that best showcase products; open sight lines, greatly enhancing visibility, and prominent, eye-catching navigational signage; raised-access flooring with modern carpeting and wood-grain accents; enhanced store lighting to make Best Buy stores feel warmer, brighter, and more inviting; and custom-built vendor-specific focal areas and fixtures to capture their specific brand personalities, drive interactivity, and provide a unique shopping experience at every turn.

While Best Buy is unable to disclose exact figures, it can say with certainty that the experience stores have performed beyond its expectations. The store-within-a-store concept has also received overwhelmingly positive feedback from satisfied customers craving interactivity and vendor partners whose brands are fully unleashed within Best Buy’s walls.

With overall store traffic and performance far exceeding initial objectives, and with customers interacting with products at unprecedented rates, it is clear that Best Buy is making big strides in building the store of the future by delivering an innovative, superior in-store customer experience the brand can continue to build upon.

Best Buy’s eCommerce team recently adopted an agile methodology which allows it to take its customer and employee experience to the next level. Being agile allows Best Buy to not only keep up, but to continue innovating and driving change in today’s fast-paced environment.
This has vastly increased the retailer’s ability to develop capabilities – for example, in 2017 Best Buy moved from just a handful of annual deployments to more than 100 – and has also empowered its people and unlocked their potential in ways Best Buy didn’t know were possible.

In just one year, Best Buy has had several key launches, such as: Brand new iPhone, iPad, and Android apps with vastly improved performance, geolocation, and omnichannel capabilities such as Delivery Promise, Reserve-and-Pick-Up, Marketplace, and more. The retailer also launched a cutting-edge mobile site optimized for Google rankings, exposing its brand to millions more people. This new mobile experience allows Best Buy to continue innovating in a world of mobile-first indexing, reduces the cost of change for new features, and offers a unified brand experience across all of its platforms. Best Buy’s reengineered website scales its Marketplace catalogue from tens of thousands to millions of unique product SKUs, offering its customers a broader assortment of products while optimizing system performance. The store also introduced a Google Home skill, the very first Google Home eCommerce integration in Canada, where Google Home users can use their Google voice assistant to shop with Best Buy, with French support, holiday buying guides, product detailed reviews, product availability, Geek Squad support, return policy, reserve in store, and order status all in development. The brand also introduced enhanced recommendations and browse history to deliver a superior, personalized customer shopping experience, and increase revenue and attach rate. Best Buy also introduced a completely customized data engine for the daily selection, organization and management of products in Google Product Advertising, redefining how buyers and data analysts can work together to deliver profit and top of line growth.

The retailer’s eCommerce department is also leveraging customer desire for a digital customer experience that embraces personalization at both the individual and audience levels by building what it calls “private shopping environments” that will enable Best Buy to provide unique pricing and front-of-line access to in-demand products for target audiences. The results of these efforts have resulted in higher app store ratings, a vastly decreased crash rate of 99%, increased traffic (by 200% to its apps and 45% via SEO to the mobile site) and revenue, and positive feedback from customers and employees alike, along with multiple omnichannel awards from the Retail Council of Canada and Canada Post over the last few years.

In addition, in order to ensure these deployments meet the changing needs of customers, Best Buy makes looking at the experience its responsible for building through a customer lens a priority. That’s why the retailer utilizes three pillars of customer insight to gather feedback: Net Promotor Scores, Opinion Lab, and its user testing interface.

Through the seamless integration of in-store, online, and mobile, Best Buy Canada is creating incredible bricks and clicks collaboration, and with an unwavering dedication to meeting customer needs, leveraging customer and consumer expectations, investing in its people, and offering unprecedented levels of service, the retailer is committed to leading the industry in providing Canadian consumers a seamless “Total Retail” experience.