Creating an in-person loyalty experience, online
Best Buy Canada 2023
I was embedded in the team dedicated to delivering the membership experience. I’ve had to think strategically about the end state experience, the iterations to get us there, and designing the end-to-end journey for our members. Working on membership has pushed my designer chops, because of the business decisions, technical constraints and timelines I’ve had to design within, whilst advocating for our customers.
The Problem. If you became a Best Buy Member today, you would probably hand back your membership card tomorrow. With a 1.6 star rating from 28 reviews, Best Buy’s membership program left plenty of room for improvement.
“This is the worst subscription I’ve purchased” writes Jason on August 5th, 2023. “As many have said before, Best Buy Canada is becoming a running joke..” says Mad on July 28, 2023. BigDickRick left a 1 star rating with no review on July 28, 2022. 8 people rated BigDickRick’s post as unhelpful.
So why would you want to cancel your membership tomorrow? If you joined today, you wouldn’t know you’re a member, save for an email confirming you bought the thing. You wouldn’t know what all your benefits are, because your welcome email would arrive in your inbox 2-3 days later (and that’s if it dodged y our spam filter). If you knew what you were entitled to, you would try (and fail) to use it online. And if you wanted to see your membership information, good luck finding the partner website that holds that data.
It’s not all doom and gloom. Head into a store and you’ll be able to buy ink cartridges and batteries at a member discounted price. In fact, most of Best Buy Membership’s benefits are driven by Blue Shirts and Geek Squad Agents applying those discounts for you. It’s a manual process, driven by pages of instructions and lookup tables.
The problem to solve was scalability. If we wanted to grow the program, we had to have a way for members to use their membership themselves.
The Approach. Best Buy Membership has gone through dozens of iterations over the past 8ish years. You might have known it by another name: Geek Squad Home Membership. And before that, there was a point system that was shelved. Across those iterations were problems, and everyone knew what the problems were. Well, more specifically, different stakeholders and levels of leadership knew of different problems. I used a customer journey map to illustrate to stakeholders what and where the problems were.
The problems that were prioritised: (1) Being able to join membership immediately; (2) Seeing your membership and benefits in your account; and (3) using your benefits online.
This crude customer journey map helped to better understand the experience customers went through. The confusion of becoming a member. The ambiguity of not knowing what they're entitled to. The frustration of trying to leave. The anger of renewing automatically. I was able to highlight the pain points, and use them as opportunities in the online experience.The Solution. 5 scrum teams under the same product group worked to bring the experience to life. Customers are able to become a member online in a way that makes sense. They can see their membership status and engage with it through their Best Buy account. And they can use their benefits online, through purchases and tech support.
Join Membership (Not live)
Customers are able to join Best Buy Membership using an approach similar to making a purchase, but in a more assisted away. Technical constraints meant that the sign-up experience paralleled the checkout experience. Strategic ambiguity meant that we had to make space for future changes to the membership plan and benefits. Business needs meant that we had to collect certain bits of customer information.
Membership Engagement
Members are able to see their membership information within their Best Buy account, which solved several problems: (1) providing a central place for customers to see and administer their active membership; (2) raising awareness about all of their membership benefits and how to use them; and (3) making it easy to get help and support about their membership. We were constrained by the data we could show the member, so we had to convey what tasks they could complete within their account, versus what had to be done through a partner website.
Members logging into their account can now see information about their membership. Benefits were displayed as tiles as a way to engage members with their membership, and encourage them to use their entitlements. Management of their membership within their account was limited, so we automatically logged them into the partner website, which they can access through "Manage your billing".Membership Promos
Members can make purchases online and receive the appropriate discount. This was a huge capability, as members were limited to receiving member discounts for in-store purchases only. Members would know if a product was eligible for a discount, by way of a “Special Offers” side sheet that would appear if they clicked on “See all offers”. User research had shown that this was a confusing and unintuitive way to convey these offers, however technical and time constraints meant that we couldn’t redesign this experience.
To receive membership discounts online, customers must be signed. After signing in, they're able to see member promotions using the existing Special Offers side sheet. The Outcome. We saw 40% of active members engage with the partner website through their account. This is significant, as the partner website was difficult to find and cumbersome to log into. The enhancements we made automatically logged a customer into the partner website, as long as they navigated through their Best Buy account.
3% engaged with the anti-virus benefits and 2% engaged with the product discount tiles in their Membership Details page. This was a baseline measure of engagement for a new experience.
With the new sign-up experience comes the sunsetting of the product details for Membership page (not live yet). While it shifts focus away from the posted negative reviews, it means we need to think of a channel to receive customer feedback.