Are you being served?
It's all very well to say "we'll offer better customer service", but we learnt a few things during our visit that make us think Best Buy might deliver. Firstly, the recruitment and training; it looks like Best Buy is focusing on attitude and motivation and even allowing for the fact that we were at a media set-piece, we found the sales assistants to be pretty keen and switched-on.
It says something that Best Buy, which has been reluctant to say a word to the media thus far, allowed us journos unfettered access to the Blue Shirts and Geek Squad representatives. Those we spoke to weren't necessarily tech obsessives, but were friendly, confident and excited about the new store.
Secondly there's the way the Blue Shirts are incentivised. They're not paid commission, so there's no pressure on them to close a sale or upsell financial services as so many other retailers do. We were told that their job is to try to help and educate the consumer to get the right product for them and, possibly most importantly, to have the kit in full working order before the customer leaves the store.
As we expected, Best Buy is geared towards technology convergence, joining most large technology companies in talking about the ‘three screens' - i.e. phone, PC and TV. Increasingly people will be able to access the same content on all three and sync between them. Best Buy aims to help its customers navigate this tech minefield and if they leave the store with all these boxes ticked, we think it will have the right to crow about its customer service.
