To sustain positive business performance, top leadership at Best Buy has shared the importance of standing out amid all other brick-and-mortar and online electronics retailers by providing customers with a solution to something that gets in their way. This is defined as Expert Service, and it comes to life when customers interact with Best Buy and find their needs addressed and their problems solved, plus they have been inspired to something they didn’t know was possible—and it seems easy.
The sales proficiency of Best Buy stores required improvement to meet an Expert Service level. This has been accomplished through Proof of Proficiencies (POP). A Proof of Proficiency is a document that is used by a store leader in validating an employee’s ability to speak knowledgeably to customers and demonstrate a recommendation that leads to a customer purchase.
Program Details
Key elements of a POP include a specific description of what the leader should hear the employee say or see the employee do. These details are created after consulting top sales leaders and employees in Best Buy stores. The POP begins with multi-unit or store leaders, so they can establish a foundation for accurate coaching of expected behaviors. Leaders then spend time with their direct reports going through the POP. When achievement of all expectations is reached, leaders submit a performance evaluation to an online portal that gives the employee credit for Proof of Proficiency completion in the Best Buy learning management system (LMS).
Proof of Proficiencies are being used for behavioral improvement in sales recommendations of premium networking products, the My Best Buy Credit Card, and service plans. Premium Networking was selected as the first POP after research was shared throughout the company that customers’ in-home networking experience was not fulfilling their desires. Today’s average adult consumer has multiple devices that use the Internet at home. If all are pulling bandwidth at the same moment, there likely is a poor experience in device use—choppy Netflix videos, slow return of search results, delayed music playing on Pandora. Best Buy employees’ ability to recommend a premium networking solution to customers directly solves this unfortunate experience.
Results
After the launch of the Premium Networking Proof of Proficiency, the category experienced a 200-basis-point (bps) improvement in revenue. Over the four months that followed, while the industry experienced flat comp performance, Best Buy continued to stay over 100 bps, with the high point being 229 bps.
The My Best Buy Credit Card POP resulted in a 170- to 230-bps improvement in card applications over a three-month period. And the positive impact of the service plan POPs was sustained over a five-month period where attachment improvements were 150 bps (more than 84,000 additional units) equating to $16.8 million incremental total company margin dollars and 60 bps equating to $5.2 million incremental margin dollars.
