Helping customers discover and purchase Best Buy’s services easily
DESIGN STRATEGY · RESEARCH · PRODUCT DESIGN
Customers know of Best buy as a leading retailer for electronics and appliances but not a lot of customers knew about the services that BBY offered through it’s sub-brand Geek Squad. Sale of services was trending downwards and there was a big missed opportunity to cross-sell services to customers and increase customer lifetime value.
Research, analysis, UX Strategy, user-testing and handover.
1 PM, 1 UX Writer, 1 UI Designer. Also collaborated with other design and development teams impacted by this initiative.
This project started out as an ask from the PM to raise awareness for Geek Squad’s Setup Services for TVs, Home Theatres and large Kitchen Appliances. I started my discovery phase by doing a complete review of the current experience and the services offered. I also worked with a Data Analyst to observe page metrics and to get a better sense of activity.
Low customer awareness of ALL Services offered by Bestbuy, not just setup services.
PUSHBACK FOR A BETTER EXPERIENCE
I pushed back to widen the scope of the problem to improve awareness of ALL services. Increasing scope is never something a PM wants to hear, but I felt it was important to provide to customers a comprehensive experience. To gain buy-in, I presented the findings of my initial discovery to the PM and stakeholders backed by insights from analytics. I also presented a roadmap to roll-out the experience strategy. This was received really well and I was able to persuade them to increase the scope but we balanced it by prioritizing the high-revenue product categories.
With the scope widened, the new problem to solve was:
“How might we make Best Buy’s services easy to find and improve customer awareness?”
🧭 Limited Navigation to services
Existing navigational menu made it difficult to discover services
🤔 Lack of info on services
There wasn’t any information across the site on the services offered
🛒 Cross-selling services did not exist
There was a huge missed opportunity for customers to discover and shop services when also shopping for products.
overview of old experience
Making services easy to find
Initial heuristic evaluation findings and user research testing indicated that the main nav menu is where customers intuitively looked for services but the menu did not have all services listed.
As a quick-win and first iteration of the nav menu, I proposed a drop down menu with links to services that are already listed in the footer.
This helped improve finding services right away. In fact, page visits tripled within
Improved flyout menu presenting all services
To provide customers with a comprehensive list of all services offered by BestBuy, the menu needed to be improved. I’m currently working on explorations for this problem.
Identifying customer mental models
I ran an open card sort study where participants classified services into categories aligning with their mental model and created the IA for the menu. I worked with a UX Writer to help create labels for the menu structure based on BestBuy’s internal standards and Design System. The proposed IA and new labels were validated with a Tree test.
Proposed Services flyout menu
Mockup of what the flyout menu could potentially look like based on the above IA and Best Buy’s current branding and Design System.
Providing information on services
There wasn’t any information across the site about services offered through Geek Squad for different product categories. Customers were only able to learn about services in-store or through an agent via phone.
Balancing content value to avoid information overwhelm
Collaborating with a UX Writer on design explorations, we set out to provide enough information about services while balancing page length and making sure CTAs were not lost among content. We explored how to highlight online services, reducing page length with a “Jump-to” section and using badges on images.
Simple, Informative and intuitive calls to action
We rejected the first exploration since it was overwhelming to customers in terms of content, and didn’t provide an intuitive experience with an “actionable next step”. The winning solution ended up using the navigational structure but still balanced both content value and clear, intuitive calls to action.
Increasing customer awareness and cross-selling services
Besides helping customers discover services, I felt it was important to integrate and raise awareness at various points in their shopping journey in an effort to cross-sell services and increase customer lifetime value.
Opportunities to cross-sell services
From past customer research conducted both in-store and online, I came to know that customers tended to view services within the context of the product rather than the service itself.For ex. A customer would search for “Dishwasher installation” rather than “Installation service”. This acted as the foundation for the entire strategy.
Using a customer journey map, I identified moments where the customer might be potentially interested in learning about services and opportunities for cross-selling.
Knowing when to push back
Advocating for the customer, balancing stakeholder expectations and business goals is definitely a “tight-rope walk”. Learning to push back on the problem with the Product team and with Stakeholders was a valuable exercise.
Handling trade-offs vs. value to the customer
The temptation to pack a lot of features to provide maximum value to customers was high. However, I had a to balance several factors when planning iterations like usability concerns, intuitiveness of the experience and stakeholder expectations. My guiding principle in this situation was “How can we deliver maximum value to the customer through the smallest unit of work”?
Collaborating with multiple teams to provide a holistic customer experience
This work involved interfacing with at least 5 other teams who were tackling different aspects of the same problem of low awareness. I facilitated kick-off meetings, regular jam sessions, workshops and showcase meetings to keep all the impacted teams informed of my work and to ensure that I’m not working in a silo.
