Best Buy Delivers Highest TV Satisfaction
November 20, 2012 2 Comments
We’re entering into the busiest season for retail sales in the U.S.with Black Friday this week and Cyber Monday next week. One of the key categories during the holiday season is TVs. Retailers plan to sell a lot of them between now and Christmas. So I decided to look into our consumer benchmark data to see which retailers provided the best experience for TV buyers.
I examined data for more than 1,300 consumers who had recently purchased TVs. The analysis compared satisfaction across multiple steps in the process for Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon.com, and other retailers. As you can see in the chart below, Best Buy delivers the best experience across just about every element of the new TV experience.
Interestingly, Best Buy’s largest advantage is in customer service (+10 percentage points), which is the area that has the lowest satisfaction level across all retailers.
The bottom line: Best Buy is the best bet for TVs
About Bruce Temkin
Bruce-
Really interesting post on Best Buy’s performance and it exemplifies an important issue we face in measuring and managing the customer experience. Customer experience is an important factor in driving future business performance, however, it is not the only factor and if we simply accept that a single measure, whether it be NPS, a loyalty metric or satisfaction, it may not tell the whole story.
Best Buy’s leadership in the electronics category is not new, in fact they have been among the best performers in the electronics customer experience for a long while. Yet their business has been challenged in recent years due to the rise of the very thing it sells, technology, specifically mobile technology. Showrooming is taking advantage of the things that Best Buy offers better than any competitor (selection, assistance and the ability to try devices), but then they lose out on the sale due to the customers ability to shop for the best price online, even while they are still in the store.
My point is that our goal in measuring the customer experience is to not only serve customers better, but drive our businesses as well. We can’t simply assume that a measure is predictive of our business performance. Including a variety of outcome metrics in our surveys and conducting linkage analysis, enable an organization to focus in on the metric that is most meaningful to their business and understand what levers they should be pulling to drive not just the customer experience metric, but the bottom line.
Michael: Thanks for your comment… and I totally agree. The purpose of customer experience is to support an organizations larger goals around its business and its brand. When companies start looking at customer experience independently (and measuring it in a vacuum), then the efforts can run adrift. The topic of show-rooming is a good one — and highlights an important sampling discussion. We asked consumers about the place they purchased their TV. Even if consumers are increasingly happy with the things they buy from Best Buy, they may be increasingly purchasing from other retailers. So the scores (without a more thorough analysis) may not be reflective of their business objectives.