Best Buy Evolves Its Leadership, Strategy, And Operations For Customer Obsession

Challenge

To deliver on its purpose, Best Buy needed to more firmly center its leadership, strategy, and operations on its customers — i.e., become more customer obsessed.

How Forrester Helped

Best Buy worked with Forrester to sharpen its customer experience vision and learn the capabilities that customer obsession requires.

Business Impact

Best Buy’s deliberate focus on customer and employee experience has translated into stronger retention, loyalty, and innovative buying experiences. The company also won Forrester’s inaugural Customer-Obsessed Enterprise Award for North America in 2023.

To set a clear vision and understand the capabilities needed to support customer obsession, Best Buy partnered with Forrester. Working with Forrester’s customer experience (CX) analysts and exposure to best-practice research helped the Best Buy team strengthen its customer obsession foundation and instill it in the company culture.

“Forrester played a critical role in shaping how we think about customer obsession,” says Wagner. “The analysts have shared a lot of wisdom and insight, pointed us to the right resources, and really supported us throughout our journey.”

A few key ways in which Forrester helped advance Best Buy’s mission include:

• Connecting employee experience to customer experience. Working with Forrester reinforced that a stellar customer experience has roots in a strong employee experience. “Employees are at the crux every single day, whether designing an experience digitally, helping a customer in a store, or going into the customer’s home,” Wagner says. “They make or break the experience.”
• Providing real-world inspiration. Research on how other companies were strengthening CX helped Best Buy decision-makers envision how this might come to life at their own company, while attending Forrester events gave them the opportunity to connect with other companies and share learnings and best practices.
• Imparting trusted advice. Forrester has been a steadfast partner throughout Best Buy’s customer obsession journey. “Anytime we have a question, we know we can just pick up the phone,” Wagner says. Talking with analysts continues to help the team broaden its perspective.

Strong executive buy-in enabled Best Buy to execute on its customer obsession vision. Among the many changes the company made was embedding its “customer office” across the organization, from marketing to other groups, in order to gather and analyze data, insights, and relationship strategies. This keen understanding of customer needs, behaviors, and expectations forms the basis of Best Buy’s enterprise strategy.

The company continues to evolve its offerings to meet customer needs for dependability, convenience, ease, and peace of mind — for example, by extending into areas such as in home tech installation and enabling care in the home to support consumers’ health. And it continually invests in customer experience enhancements, from how it runs its stores and trains employees to how it designs its loyalty programs.

Customer obsession is more than just a mindset or passion for the customer — it’s a way of operating a business. Best Buy’s investments in customer experience and employee experience have helped it:

• Grow its base of most loyal customers. Best Buy leveraged its deep customer knowledge to relaunch its loyalty program to target offerings at three levels to distinct customers with specific needs. The company most recently reported that it ended its FY24 fiscal year with 7 million members for its paid membership, up from 5.8 million at the start of the year.
• Retain and develop employees. Best Buy’s average tenure (excluding its seasonal workforce) is just under five years for field employees and nearly 16 years for general managers. The vast majority of employees in key leadership roles are hired internally, and ongoing training and certification are part of the employee experience.
• Innovate and boost convenience through supplier partnerships. Best Buy’s Partner+ program enhances availability of the goods that customers want, from early access to exclusive products. Best Buy even provides its stores as a pickup point for some of its suppliers’ direct-to-consumer sales, offering a better, faster, and cheaper delivery experience for customers and allowing partners to expand their reach.

Best Buy’s customer-obsessed transformation has also earned it recognition: In 2023, the company won Forrester’s inaugural Customer-Obsessed Enterprise Award in North America, which recognizes organizations that put the customer at the center of their leadership, strategy, and operations to achieve wins for customers, employees, and the business. The winners are also recognized for encouraging deep collaboration across the
business to ensure that customer obsession aligns to the organization’s brand promise.

“Forrester has been a tremendous partner over the years,” Wagner says. For companies looking to embark on their own customer obsession journeys, she adds, “the external, outside-in perspective that Forrester brings to the relationship can really lead to unlocking that value in your organization.”