Quick and Easy Store Pickup

Best Buy Canada is one of the largest omni-channel retailers of consumer technologies, expanded assortment, and marketplace sellers. However, during COVID-19 Health Canada's mandated for physical distancing which dramatically increased online sales and led to a 40% increase in delivery times. As 80% of Canadians live 25km away from a Best Buy store, Quick and Easy Store Pickup enabled customers to maintain national and provincial health and safety regulations while ensuring customers can get their product within the same day.

Role: User Experience Designer

Context

Best Buy has always offered customers the ability to Reserve online and Pick Up in stores (RPU). Customers would make a reservation online and within 20 mins, customers can head to a store to pick up their desired product. Payment was only required upon pickup. Although this was convenient for our customers, this was problematic for the business because the average pickup rate was 40%, committed customers who visit the stores would be unable to purchase the reserved product, and there was an immense labour cost to return 60% of the products back to the sales floor.

Understanding the User Problem

Although there was a clear business problem, I needed to uncover what was the “user problem”. I facilitated a workshop with Store Leaders, Retail Operations Directors and Project Managers to uncover the day-to-day painpoints experienced at the store. The primary user were loyal Best Buy customers that were familiar with Reserve and Pickup. The secondary users were the Blue Shirt Associates that work at a store.

Synthesizing the Data

Through leveraging existing web data, intel from store leaders, conducting ethnographic research, and on-site observational studies, I was able to gather a vast amount of customer and store data around the pick up experience. A service design blueprint was created to map out the motivations, actions, and emotion for both customers and the associates working at a store. The blueprint became a valuable tool used to communicate value and opportunities across various stakeholders and numerous departments. As a result, it helped identify the area to best focus our development efforts and strategic positioning for the organization.

Key Opportunities

Introduce Prepaid Pickup
- Ensures that the pickup experience is quick and seamless
Enable Customers to Reserve Multiple Products
- So that customers can shop the way they want to
- To be on par with the competitive landscape
Improve Store Tools
- To increase performance and usability of these legacy tools

What are the Metrics of Success?

Increased Pickup Rate

Increased Labour Savings

Increased Web Experience Satisfaction

Increased Store Experience Satisfaction

Decreased Customer Notification Time

Creating the Strategy

In order to clearly communicate “What we are going do?” I created a strategic iteration plan based on business requirements, development feasibility, and user needs. This plan helped build stakeholder confidence as they were able to see what the vision and ideal end-state looked like based on current knowledge. It also highlighted each iteration and what insights we hoped to gain to inform the following iteration. If pivots were necessary, this could be easily adapted.

Weighing the Trade-offs

At this point, Health Canada and Provincial Health authorities mandated that all businesses must close if they were unable to meet stringent safety regulations. In response to the mandate, I made rapid experience design decisions to leverage existing design patterns to ensure that that our stores can remain open. These decisions became rapid learning grounds to iterate on the design. Brand new communication channels were created with store operations to gain live feedback from store leaders across the nation.

Iterations through feedback

Through constant feedback with stores, many rapid iterations were made to the curbside pickup experience. The following lists some prominent enhancements:

Introduced warranty within the flow to provide customers an opportunity to purchase a peace of mind during a time of uncertainty
Updated primary “Reserve” CTA to “Pickup in Store” be contextual to a customer’s action
Improved store status messaging to help set customer expectation when they are deciding to pick up at a store
Accelerated email creation and provided customer more context
Incorporated additional signage to increase clarity of instructions around store pickup

Evaluating the Experience

Through the rapid feedback loop from store leaders, web analytics, NPS and user research, I synthesized the data and aggregated it into varying degrees of criticality so that the development team can action on the highest value customer frictions.

Furthermore, to understand the impact of the omni-channel experience, I evaluated the experience holistically from both the web and store experience.

I ran participants through remote unmoderated user tests to evaluate the web purchase and status notification experience. I also established a SUS baseline so that my team and I can monitor the impact of future iterations on Quick and Easy Store Pickup experience.

Furthermore, I created store surveys to evaluate the in-person pickup experience. These surveys were sent to stores nationwide to gain qualitative insights around customer behaviours and preferences. Questions were broken out to evaluate experience familiarity, loyalty, time expectations, customer motivations and satisfaction.

The Result

The Quick and Easy Store Pickup model met Canadian and Provincial health and safety regulations so Best Buy stores were able to remain open for customer order pickup during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. This resulted in significant sale opportunities for customers who needed their orders quickly.

The pickup rate of Quick and Easy Store Pickup orders is 90% compared to 60% from our previous solution, Reserve and Pickup (RPU). This has resulted in significant cost savings in labour—our store associates are no longer spending hours putting abandoned orders back on our shelves.

Through surveys asking customers to evaluate their ease of pickup, 75% of participants rated Quick and Easy Store Pickup the highest score of 5 – Very Easy compared to 74% with RPU. This information combined with customer verbatim reveals that customers are successfully learning how to pick up with Best Buy and are generally confident with the pickup process. Furthermore, 77% of Quick and Easy Store Pickup customers rated the highest score of 5 – Very Satisfied when asked to evaluate their overall pickup experience compared to 71% with RPU.

We’ve continually iterated on the process to reduce the time taken for customers to receive their ready for pickup email. When this service first launched, the average wait time was 165 minutes. We’re now down to an average of 32 minutes, a reduction of more than 2 hours.

What would I have done Differently?

Given that there was more time, I would further optimize the post purchase experience for the customer and streamline the store tools for the associates. A decrease in customer frustration, call centre calls, and an increase in NPS score will occur by ensuring that customers see their order status, understand clear and concise pickup instructions, and accurate signage at stores.

On the other hand, by further streamlining legacy and monolithic tools that the associates use everyday, it will increase learnability of the tool by Blue Shirt Associates— especially when seasonal employees are hired. In turn, the efficiency established by the Blue Shirt associates directly impacts the customers experience, meaning a faster pick up experience for the customer.

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