On The Importance of Being Customer Centric, a Conversation with the VP of Best Buy

As part of my summer at Google, I've had the opportunity to meet countless people that are reshaping and influencing corporate America this decade.

Bill Thompson, the vice president and territory general manager of Best Buy, came to speak to a small group at Google on the focus on customer centricity. The term refers to the orientation of a company to the needs and behaviors of its customers, rather than internal drivers (such as the quest for short term profit). The Best Buy executive led us through an invigorating presentation that presented the company's key Standard Operating Practices (SOPs), values and vision.


"Stack it high and watch it fly" was one of the key phrases that sparked from Thompson's presentation. Best Buy seeks to have it all, and let customers do the rest. "The business was getting far more complicated than we were able to convey to our client," said the Vice President when describing the business model and complexity.

In the early 2000's Best Buy turned massive wheels to focus their main powers on the "customer centricity" model. It's literally all about serving the customer right, customer service- how well are you listening to the customer, and then meeting his needs.

70% of what a store will do is based on SOPs: stores must connect to communities. A great example for Best Buy was the Tech Tax repeal through the "Geek Squad Rally" and their having joined forces with the local people to seek support. Bill Thompson assures that their strategy is centered on grassroots initiatives, benefiting communities.

Customer Centricity's Goals

Donna Fluss puts it best. A major impediment to building a customer-centric organization is the conflicting goals of the primary customer-facing departments: sales, marketing and service. Somehow, in the drive to achieve goals, each department loses sight of customers as people and sees them only as "objects" that need to be optimized. (See Figure above) Clearly, the obvious answer is to shift the focus back to customers and to align corporate goals. The problem is that when some companies have tried to standardize goals, their revenues decreased, customer satisfaction fell and loyalty dropped off, because the three primary customer-facing groups failed to cooperate.

Best Buy encourages its employees to be innovative and eager to bring about ideas through the "Idea Development Summit" every year. Best Buy gives its employees the freedom to make decisions and take action at the local level. One whole market is dedicated to selling Korean fridges in the branches because their community members in those cities happen to be Korean, and one employee was intuitive enough to identify that opportunity and divert from the SOP. Wait till you hear about the branch manager in California who hired 8 full time sign language proficient employees to target the population attending the 70 sign language schools in the area- revenue increased by 27 percent! Finally, Target's "You Spoke, We Listened" campaign surveyed students on what features they needed and Best Buy ordered the computers on those provisions.

It's all about local growth plans, about developing the communities where they're based and adopting those practices on the national level.

He ended the conversation on this note: "Try to satisfy their needs, selling will happen by on its own".

The Model

Promise Phelon wrote a very interesting article on Inc. magazine, titled "Are you really customer centric?"