Summary
In 2018, Best Buy re-branded. The impact of this otherwise ordinary corporate event went far beyond getting a spiffy new logo and a custom font. This talk will tell the story of how our effort to re-brand kicked off a profound cultural transformation at the company. It will cover: How rolling out the brand led to the creation of a CX vision that helped make it real for each of our 125,000 employees How this catalyzed the need to centralize our experience design organizations into a unified force How the company continues to use the guiding behaviors created in the rebrand to enable experiences our customers and employees will love
Key Insights
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Best Buy’s rebrand in 2018 shifted the company identity from transactional to relationship-focused, emphasizing the happiness business.
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Employees view Best Buy as a family with deep expertise, which became the foundation for customer experience transformation.
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The guiding behaviors Be Human, Make It Real, and Think About Tomorrow connect internal culture to external customer experience.
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Customer obsession was deliberately chosen as a provocative term to drive continuous improvement and high emotional engagement.
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Best Buy categorizes companies on a spectrum from transactional to customer aware to customer obsessed, aiming for the latter.
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They recognize employee experience as equally critical to customer experience; empowered employees are essential to delivering care.
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Cory Berry, CEO, emphasized empathy during COVID, prioritizing safety and human-centered decisions in operating models.
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Cultural transformation requires balancing audience segmentation, role awareness, engagement capacity, and adoption for sustainable change.
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Systematic change takes roughly five years and must focus on practice-based behavior change, not just chasing outcomes.
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Monitoring both leading (behavioral adoption) and lagging (customer/employee satisfaction) indicators is crucial for measuring transformation progress.
Notable Quotes
"We’re no longer in the business of selling computers and TVs. We are in the happiness business."
"Let’s talk about what’s possible. This is the inspiring friend coming to you and saying, let’s talk."
"Be human means seeing the person on the other side as a human being and digging in to understand their needs."
"Customer obsessed means putting the customer at the heart of all we do by anticipating their needs and applying insights."
"You have to empower your employees before you can pass on care to customers, it’s absolutely critical."
"The average CX transformation takes about five years. It can be painful, but it’s good pain."
"People don’t believe their way into new actions, they act their way into new beliefs."
"We have to slow down to speed up — understanding the why before rushing into change."
"Too many messages cause change fatigue, especially during a pandemic; strategic communication is key."
"Our purpose is to enrich people’s lives with technology by not just selling but helping them use it better."
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