Services:Best Buy uses 3 elements of the service-product bundle. These three bundles include, explicit service, implicit service and facilitating goods. Explicit service are tangible services such as fast and accurate service. Implicit refers to the feelings created by the service, like that of dread for going to work. Facilitating goods are the actual tangible products, for example when you receive the toy you bought at the toy store. Best Buy is mainly recognized as a distributor of electronic devices and accessories. Their electronic devices and accessories would be considered to be their facilitating goods, where the customers will physically receive their products in hand. Despite Best Buy's reputation for products, they are a leader in offering explicit services include their Best Buy Credit cards, reward zone cards, computer/tv/car installations and protection plans. Best Buy offers their credit cards and Reward Zone cards to customers to keep them connected to Best Buy for current and future purchases. Best Buy has several implicit services in which they wish to deliver to their customers. The implicit services are low prices, educate of the consumer, good customer service and friendly shopping environment. All of these implicit services work together to form one of Best Buy's ultimate goals of customer satisfaction.
Best Buy offers their services to customers in a pretty standardized way. Customers are given limited customization options and or standardized. This process of offering services is known on the service matrix as the co-routed service method. Best Buy offers services to consumers to deliver, set up, mount and calibrate their televisions, but not the option of the customer creating their own customized service.
Customer Contact/ Employee Support:
Best Buy follows the Face-to-Face Tight Specs customer contact system. Within this system, it requires Best Buy to offer high customer contact. Best Buy has a system of measuring their customer with a few questions they give their employees to ask in order to determine how much time is needed to efficiently help the customer and still meet both parties’ needs. Best Buy employees are trained to ask relevant information to determine whether or not the customer requires demonstrations of higher end products vs. lower end and also to determine if the customer needs complete undivided attention vs. quick Q&A’s. By training employees to recognize customer needs it allows for smoother relationship management and to convert those browsers into customers. One example is that a gentleman might walk into PC Richards and want to look at high end televisions. The PC Richards rep is taught to spend less time with the customer discussing the features of the TV and more time trying to complete the sale. If that customer wants to purchase a high end television, he is generally going to want more attention because more of his hard earned money will be going into the sale.
These customers may seek Best Buy for help in the decision because they will get undivided attention. This is one of Best Buy’s competitive advantages. At the same time that the customer is looking for a high end TV, another customer is looking for a quick purchase and an associate would be assisting him in a timely manner. So although high customer contact can be considered to be inefficient, Best Buy found a way to convert that inefficiency into a positive outcome for both the customer and company. One way Best Buy goes about supporting their employees is by training their employees with demonstrations by managers and with instructional computer based programs. Best Buy offers their employees the CARE PLUS system in order to remain constant and efficient. The Care Plus System includes C-Contact the customer, A-Ask the customer questions, R-Recommend the best solutions, E-Encourage the customer to make the purchase and lastly Plus- Plus whatever else you personally can give the customer to enhance their shopping experience. Best Buy does have many departments or segments to their business that utilize low customer contact including, the Media Department where you would find DVD’s, Games, and Music. Two other departments or segments include Phone Sales and Dot.Com sales. Phone sales involve a customer calling in and purchase a predetermined product that can easily and quickly be picked up at a later time. The same goes for Dot.Com purchases. A Dot.Com purchase allows for customers to take their time to shop online and then pick up their orders within the store. There is very little customer contact in those examples. For the most part Best Buy uses a combination of Technology and Focused Operations to for customer contact. Everything is strategically set up to ensure the customer has the best experience. Because Best Buy is a major retailer they use technology for Point of Sale Scanners, Bar Code Readers, inventory control computers and telecommunication.
Service Recovery & Guarantees:
Buy stands out from many companies because they can cost effectively manage their products to and from the customer. Best Buy offers a 30 day Return Policy on most items except for Camera’s, Camcorders, Desktop Computers and Laptop Computers. Best Buy will even extend their 30 day return policy during the holiday season to one month following Christmas. Within a BBY store there is a designated area for returns and exchanges, called Customer Service. At customer service, if a customer is returning an item, the associate will collect the product and check for damages and parts. From there, the associate will send it either to the department for inspection or to Geek Squad, who fully tests the product to determine if it needs to be sent back to the manufacturer. If a product passes all inspections it will be repackaged and put back out onto the sales floor and sold at a discounted rate for being an Open Item. This allows for BBY to not fully lose out on their costs. Best Buy also offers extended warranties on most major electronics and some Medias like Games and DVD’s. For each product that an extended warranty is offered, there are different sets of rules that apply to its policies.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2004/07/01/374813/index.htm
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