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Putting People First, Products Second
Admittedly, Best Buy’s transformation began as a top-down
effort. We began by fostering an owner/operator culture
at a small number of lab stores, which developed new ways
to meet the needs of specific customer segments. In essence,
these stores served as our R&D arm for researching customer
segments and the value propositions that matter to them.
The lab stores delivered impressive top-line results, which gave the initiative momentum. Last year, we replicated and
built on their performance using a group of 67 segmented
stores. Customers clearly indicated through their purchases
that they preferred this new operating model.
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Unleashing the Power of Our Employees
How is a customer-centric store different? The main improvement is our approach to our employees. We expose our employees to the customer segments that visit our stores
and train them to identify unmet needs. We encourage
employees to ask customers lifestyle questions and engage
in fresh dialog so that they can recommend suitable solutions.
Then we train employees to hypothesize, test and verify
new ways to meet specific needs of the local population.
We also build employees’ financial acumen, so they can
link new offerings with daily profit-and-loss statements.
They begin to act like owner/operators, and they can
more clearly envision a career at Best Buy. |
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