Originally posted by: chrisbtx
Okay, normally I just skim through this forum and read the great deals, but this post just really pissed me off. So I joined just to say what's on my mind.
I work at Best Buy. I've been there for over a year now, and I feel that those of you who talk bad about the stores are either babies because you didn't get your way on something you shouldn't have anyway, or that you just live near a bad store. I love working at the store I work at (in Houston). The managers are all really nice and work to make the customers happy. In fact, that might be a reason why we are one of the top stores in the company. Anyways, very few people that I know that work at my store are not knowledgable on at least the products in their departments. Yeah, some of them do talk to eachother when customers are around, but not all of them. The sales reps all have (well, are supposed to be, anyways) to be at least 18 to work the sales floor as well.
I've seem young people working at my local store, that I would be hard-pressed to assume that they were at least 18. I don't hold that against them, certainly not. But I do expect at least a certain level of professionalism from them. I actually haven't ever seen any direct correlation between unprofessionalism and youth though, although I have seen a correlation between knowledge/experience and youth.
I was also fairly impressed with the knowledge that most of the guys working in the computer (video cards/HDs/etc) section had on products and computers in general. Then again, I'm on the east-coast, and with all of the corporate downsizing that happened the last few years, there's a surplus of knowledgeable computer people to go around, it seems.
Originally posted by: chrisbtx
I just feel like the view of Best Buy is overall skewed because of the people who love to complain. Then again, that's how views are always distorted. It's easier to point out the mistakes and downsides than it is to do the opposite. In the entire time that I have worked at best buy, I have seen less than five customers get very upset because of lack of service, and I have only had simple problems (customers who were just mean in general) with a couple of people.
Hmm, point taken. I did not start a thread, each time that BestBuy
did give me a sucessful price-match, but to be fair, most of them were deals that I learned about on ATHD, and I
did post about my PM success inside the thread(s). I suppose more motivated by human-nature to brag about getting in on the deal, than to heap kudos on BestBuy, but the reader is free to intepret it either way.
Originally posted by: chrisbtx
As to the PM policy, our managers have us call the store that's located closest to us everytime if it even goes that far, as most the time they just have us take the ad and do the PM. They have us PM on internet ads after we log onto the site ourselves to check and verify that there is no shipping costs, because otherwise that would be factored in to the total PM cost. Other than that, PM at our store as well as a couple of others in the Northwest Houston area that I have been to for that purpose has not been a problem either.
See, to me, that's
good customer-service, and the type and level of customer-service that I had been recieving. I was happy with it, which is why I went back to BestBuy. I know it sounds so basic and simple but treat a customer right - they'll want to go back. Treat a customer wrongly, or raise their expectations and then disappoint them, and they'll most likely leave and not come back.
(As an aside - Dell understands that, that's why those insane rebate deals, they usually come through in the end, because Dell understands customer-service on a long-term scale.)
Originally posted by: chrisbtx
I just get very annoyed when I read all these posts about people complaining and wanted to put in my 2 cents.
Thanks for your time!
Well, I honestly didn't start this as a "bestbuy sucks thread", more of a "look - new PM policy issues, check this out!"
It's interesting to contrast your post with
Namtaru's post, because he claims that my store's "new" policies are the ones that he's had all along, and yet my store's "old" policies match up nicely with what you've described as the working policies at your store. I find it interesting that your store PM's internet sites - does the PM policy on your wall, have a clause "(excludes internet offers)" or something like that?
I have nothing against stores not pricematching random sites on the internet, but IMO they should PM prices of a
local retail competitor, even if those prices are advertised on that competitor's web site. The issues at hand are the store, and the prices of the items, not whether those prices were conveyed via the internet, radio or television ads, or printed ads. As long as the store is a retail competitor, and the price is good to go (and in-stock), and all of those are verifiable, then it seems quite reasonable to assume that a PM should be forthcoming, especially if presented to a customer as a "guarantee".
The CSR handling the PM, should have the responsibility to verify all of the above, and in that process of verification, if the CSR needs to call another store, or check a web site, they should do that, IMHO.
As you describe,
chrisbtx, your store apparently does that. That's excellent! A very commendable level of customer-service.
But it's clear from the varied responses, that the level of service presented to the customer at BestBuy (and other stores, certainly), is very much a YMMV, and there seems to be a small but sad number of cases of CSRs that enjoy "power-tripping" on the customer, to deny them things, just for the sake of denying them. (Not just at BB, I've read anecdotes in this and other threads about the same things happening at CC and Staples and OM. too.) Btw, for the record, I did
not encounter that behaviour at my store, all of the CSRs were amiable, although some seemed to have a minor "attitude", but I attributed it to working a long day on a Saturday and nothing else, certainly not spite.
It might surprise some of the people attempting to criticize me, that I've also been on the other side of the price-match issue, when I worked for some time for a smaller computer reseller that did computer shows. So yeah, I've worked "retail" too, and I do know what it's like to deal with customers, and theft.
Anyways - during the dot.com heydays, we used to get all kinds of customers coming in asking if we would price-match buy.com, usually with a web-site printout. Now, for those that weren't around on the internet when buy.com started - they had a very
unique pie-in-the-sky dot.com business model. Their business model, was to sell computer products at retail,
intentionally below cost. Really, they were trying to screw all other (mostly B&M at the time) retailers, by using their extremely inflated wad of cash to absorb any losses, while they attempted to grab aggressive market-share. The "loss" that they encountered on items, was to be made up for by internet advertising. (Remember, this was before the dot.com "crash", and internet advertising was the Next Big Thing, with ad revenues projected to exceed even television advertising, IIRC.)
Eventually, the crash happened, Buy.com changed their business model to be something a bit less "extreme", and hey, they survived the crash. (It's pretty clear that their pie-in-the-sky business model, like most dot.com dreams, was in the long term unsustainable. You can't stay in business selling goods below cost.)
Another thing that people should know, if they've never been to a "computer show", it's sort of like a flea market, but with most sellers mostly selling new goods, a lot of OEM stuff too, moreso than retail-box kit.
This is a short-term, hyper-competitive environment, with emphasis on making lots of sales, quickly. Price-matching in this environment, is almost a
way of life. It's kind of like a stock market. For most common items, a customer can go to any number of dealer booths to get, and at any number of range of prices. This is where customer-service, in some cases, can be a clear differentiator as well. The fellow that I worked for, was one of the larger, and more legit dealers. He offered warrantees, had a fairly generous return policy, etc. Unlike some of the other dealers, many of whom didn't speak much english at all, some fly-by-nighters, etc. Unfortunately, because he bought legit goods, from legit distributors that backed up their goods with dealer warrantees as well, his prices were sometimes higher than some other dealers.
Here's where buy.com comes in, and why customers asking to price-match Buy.com's "below cost" prices really was a PITA. See, Buy.com was actually started by/owned by, one of the largest wholesale distributors, one of whom this dealer purchased wholesale goods from. Literally, retail customers could purchase the same goods directly over the internet, for less than he could get them for wholesale, in quantity It was quite frankly a rediculous situation, he was effectively in a channel price-war with his own distributor for customers. So I had to tell customers that no, sorry, we simply can't match Buy.com's price, oftentimes that was literally below our cost. I tried to explain how their price model was flawed, and how that was hurting other smaller retailers, including outselves. I would also try to suggest to the customer that they could save the time and extra expense of mail-order, by purchasing the product right then and there, and I usually offered them a discount. Some customers simply didn't want to pay more than Buy.com's artificially-low price for the item, and walked away. Some of them recognized the value of the customer-service that a local dealer with legit warrantees and reasonable prices could provide, and purchased things there. It was a tradeoff.
On the whole, it was an exciting experience working in that sort of an enviroment, but it was also very, very stressful. While there was a large pressure to make sales quickly, I tended to sometimes chat with customers about technical issues, and often gave them simple tech-support advice for free. My boss wasn't always happy with me doing this, but I also we also had quite a few solid repeat customers that we would always see at the same show locations, and some of them even came back and personally thanked me for my suggestions and helping them choose a product or fix an issue that they had with something. So I know that customer-service does mean something, and repeat customers can often be your best customers. I also know what it's like to work in a crazy, fast paced environment, where price-matching is the word of the day. It was fun.
Btw, we didn't have an sort of explicit price-match policy, generally it was understood that all of the dealers at a computer show would "deal", more or less. It is a very purely-capitalistic supply-demand setting. We did have a printed return/warrantee policy that we gave to customers, either with a purchase or if they asked for it.
So that's the story of my background/experience, on the "other side of the fence", on these issues.