Service Experience is King in the insatiable customer experience economy. The days of Big Box Retailing are Dead. The new war for acquisition and retention is service innovation.
Best Buy, one of the industry’s leading electronic retailers - has a new strategy coined, “Customer Centricity,” where a geek squad of technology literate staff help consumers select optimal solutions to meet their computer or home needs. They have shamelessly borrowed WalMart’s door greeting strategy and have Best Buy greeters bearing friendly smiles at each of their 800 stores -with a simple greeting of “How is it Going?, Welcome to Best Buy.”
Best Buy earned US $763M or US$1.55 per share during Q1, 2007 up from US $644M a year earlier. Revenue has risen by twenty one percent to US $12.9B.
Retailers are an extremely competitive environment and for companies to grow competitively; they have to control their costs. The growth in retailing must be squarely focused on the customer experience.One interesting fact that still has me shaking my head as a business strategist - is that Best Buy Store designs are still set up for male shoppers - when the market’s buying power has shifed to eighty percent of home electronic buying designs are made by women. Floor layouts, color schemes at Best Buy are not visually attractive to women buyers and leveraging the customer centric experience to harness this buying power is currently a missed opportunity.
So what can Best Buy Do to be more customer centric?
1.) Explore using View 22, a leading provider of 3D Web Commerce and media solutions which are creating rich customer experiences using interactive web solutions to enable customers to visualize, configure and purchase products through an intuitive and unique online experience. Companies using these advanced experience economy like solutions include: GE, Kohler, John Deere etc.
2.) Leverage Narrative Inquiry (Story Telling) Customer Research insight techniques that have less market researcher bias than traditional market research methods. Helix Commerce, our firm, has partnered with Cognitive Edge to bring to market advanced innovation solutions to enrich customer intelligence to identify customer needs, wants, behaviours and seek insights that are complex to easily detect. These methods are also more effective at identifying disruptive innovation patterns that more traditional market research methods.
3.) Provide Knowledgeable Gurus - that are experts in interior design with different expertise domains - eg: Vintage, Classic, French Country, Art Deco, etc. and set up online access to design libraries integrated into a collaborative community where customers can easily select models and contribute models to create an ongoing customer community.There is no end of possibilities when capturing the wisdom of the customer as a community to share best design ideas and create an ongoing forum for customer intelligence dialogue.
In summary, the service experience economy in every industry continues to take on heightened creativity in the war for winning the customer’s wallet and more importantly now their hearts. The next generation of customer centricity stickiness will be at the emotional and relationship level as value continues to shift to the service experience value proposition. Best Buy may currently number one - but the opportunities for companies like Circuit City, Future Shop, etc will be in differentiating themselves on the service experience. There is still room for more innovation in this market - imagine Disney and Best Buy creating new purchasing experiences or Best Buy teaming with IDEA to develop future store designs….there is no end of creative possibilities - other than simply stopping and thinking outside the box.
For more innovation on Helix’s innovation services, please contact us at info@helixcommerce.com. Dr. Cindy Gordon can be reached at cindy@helixcommerce.com. Helix has helped companies like: Bell Canada, Microsoft, RBC, Rogers, SAP, Siemens, Xerox and many others look at their current go to market capabilities and envision new possibilities.