\r\n \r\nIn a recent webinar, Ricky Hon, an interactive display and design expert at Best Buy Canada and IV Dickson, chief innovation officer at SageNet laid out the retailer’s digital signage journey. They discussed the meticulous process of designing, testing, and launching new initiatives, while also sharing advice for retailers who are embarking on their own digital transformation journeys.
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In this edited webinar transcript, Hon and Dickson explore how Best Buy Canada's digital experience breakthroughs have shaped the company’s journey, providing customers with interactive and personalized experiences and driving business impact.
Maia Jenkins: Welcome, everyone, to this webinar on “Pivotal Revelations on Digital Experience with Best Buy Canada,” which is hosted by RIS and presented in partnership with SageNet. My name is Maia Jenkins, I'm an editor at RIS News, and I thank you for joining us.
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In today's retail landscape, providing seamless and impactful digital experiences is more important than ever. Customers are hyper-connected and hyper-informed. There's been rapid advances in technologies, all of which set the pace that retailers have to keep up with. Companies like Best Buy Canada recognize the urgent need to remain in-step with these advances and are leveraging technology to create more seamless, memorable, personalized experiences for customers. Over the course of this webinar, we’ll look at top considerations when designing, testing, and launching a new digital signage initiative. Real world examples from Best Buy Canada's own journey, measuring and quantifying the success of these initiatives and digital experiences more broadly, as well as why and how retailers like Best Buy Canada have prioritized digital signage in digital experience initiatives.
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So Ricky and IV, welcome, let’s take a moment to introduce yourselves and say a few words about your roles at your respective company.
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Ricky Hon: Thank you. My name is Ricky. I'm part of the store design group here at Best Buy Canada, and I specifically lead two very different departments that somewhat go hand-in-hand, in the end. The first department I lead is the interactive display and design department, and the other is the GNFR department, which is everything that is goods not for resale. IV?
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IV Dickson: I'm IV Dickson, the chief innovation officer for SageNet. I've been here for about six years in a role around digital experience and digital engagement. My role has expanded to not only help our organization understand how we apply the technologies that we have in our portfolio, but also to work with customers, such as Ricky, to look at the now as well as the future. What does innovation mean in the technologies that are being deployed today and where is the technology landscape going, especially in a space like retail.
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Jenkins: Wonderful, with that, IV, I'll let you take it from there.
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Dickson: Thank you very much. I'm excited for this conversation. I had the pleasure a couple of weeks ago to work with Ricky in-person at an event, somewhat like this. Before we did that, we were able to get into a Best Buy Canada store and hear from Ricky directly about some of the challenges that he's had, some of the things that he has learned over many years of doing this, but also just understand how we look to the future of engagement with customers in retail.
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Today, we’ll start by talking a little bit about industry trends and forecasts. Where's the world going? We've come out of a massive pandemic worldwide, we know that retail has gone up and down over that time, and where are we headed now? Then, Ricky and I will take some time to talk about what Best Buy Canada has done over more than a decade with digital experiences as well as some real world examples of that digital journey when you're in a Best Buy Canada retail store. Next, we'll look at some of those top considerations: How do these digital experiences come alive? How do you find engagement with customers? And how do you make that functional not only for the brand itself, but also for the end customer journey as they walk through that with you?
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Last but never least, observations and advice – things that'll make this fly. To start, let’s walk through some industry trends, then Ricky will talk through some specifics of Best Buy Canada.
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Probably the best place to start is with RIS. Much of the data that I’ll share came from an RIS research profile that was put together in a downloadable white paper, but we found it very interesting and applicable to today's conversation.
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One of the things that really stood out in this report is the fact that store purchase is still the lion's share of the transaction. There are still customers that are coming inside that environment, interacting with the physical space of the brick-and-mortar, and then making a purchase there. As much as there is growth in the buy-online-deliver-from-warehouse or even the buy-online-pickup-in-store – 70% of store purchases means that individuals are still going to the brick-and-mortar space and want to engage in that experience.
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The other thing that jumped out at me was the second side of this environment: Personalizing that customer experience. These are top priorities of brands that are out in the world of retail and this is key, how do you personalize it? How do you personalize this experience in a way that's not creepy, but is valuable to that buying outcome that's not only for the end user experience, but also for the brand.
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What’s interesting is that the bottom four all match, coming in at around 30%: self-checkout or consumer apps, supported contactless payments, upgrade of WAN and Wi-Fi, and connecting disparate systems. These are all environments that are a greater technology subset that make that consumer experience better, what we might refer to as seamless technologies or connected technologies. When you forget that those all go together and aren't just silos, that can be hard for a retail brand.
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About half of retailers are good with curbside, understand how it works, and learned. It might have been painful during the pandemic, but they learned and are in a pretty good place or know what upgrades need to be made. However, 40% of retailers need to upgrade the digital experience in store and need to figure out how to make that something better than it was before. This is key. Whether it's signage, kiosks, or even interactive technologies such as magic mirror touch screens, these are vital to moving forward in the coming years. If you think about the data we just shared and about engaging customers in a more personal way, this lines up with that.
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That brings us to the third piece of the puzzle, which is understanding what this all means. Is it valuable to the organization? Is it valuable not only to you as a retailer, but also the end customer? Looking at this data was fascinating because these two statistics are almost in contrast with what the market is telling us, and yet they are an opening door into the future. One-third of retailers need more price intelligence, more understanding of what the customer thresholds are associated with price, and where value plays into that.
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However, although the market is saying artificial intelligence or AI in every other sentence, the reality is retailers are still cautious around that. They're still not sure how that affects the business yet. Because of that, there's a lean in here to the future. Looking at this one-third, two-third breakdown, the reality is the door opening experience is around understanding pricing intelligence and the data that’s had today, as well as the fact that it may lead us to an environment where in two, three or five years we are in a situation where traditional AI or machine learning starts to affect that experience.
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The last piece of this puzzle, from a data perspective, is around streamlining checkout – it relates to that pricing intelligence conversation. It relates to personalization, to the connected experience, and the seamless technologies. However, the majority of retailers don't actually have plans to implement a grab-and-go or completely cashless experience. One-third of retailers say it's a place where mobile can play a role in the next 24 months around payment choices. This is key. If you don't have those infrastructures in place and don't have that greater good of infrastructure to make the end customer journey valuable, then your customer may be seeking other environments where that plays a role. The data lines up in each scenario in a way that is valuable to the end customer as well as the brand.
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Now, how are retail and digital changing? How is it becoming something more or staying the same as it was? What we are seeing beyond the data is that there's at least a half dozen, if not more, places in retail where digital is affecting the outcome or can affect the outcome. Some of them are things that have been around forever, such as digital signage screens, which are informational or highly engaging. Some of them have come because of the pandemic, like curbside. How does contactless and convenience become a bigger portion of the retail environment, knowing that 70%, if not more, of the transactions are in-store in a traditional manner. Some retailers are really starting to change the game – things like virtual fitting solutions in traditional apparel retail. How can an environment be augmented to get people what they want quicker? Pick-up towers if customers are coming into the retail space, not getting it at curbside. How do I make that transaction easier and faster in shopping online before I get there?
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Then there's the conversation of robotics. Although this is a retail discussion, I was just at the National Restaurant Association Show this week, and the convergence of traditional retail and restaurant every day gets closer and closer. When you look at robotics – whether it be back of house warehousing robotics, front of house inventory, or even delivery robotics – they are a conversation. There may not be a conversation in reality in the store for three to five more years, but many of the technologists that we work with are making decisions that are five to seven years out, and those have to grow into fruition. It's almost like making a 2030 discussion. This is where Best Buy has excelled.
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How does SageNet and Best Buy connect? We've been working with Best Buy for more than 10 years, we have about 3,000 media players in the world. If you do the math, you can get to like 30 stores. We'll share how they started at a much higher number, almost 100 media players or digital experiences at a store.
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It’s a content management interactive experience. One of the things that has led to this type of experience is that Ricky and Best Buy Canada have come to the reality of how to engage the end user with the technologies they have on the shelf in a way that allows them not only to understand what they're buying, but to make a more comprehensive purchase and enjoy that purchase after they walk out of the store. Technology changes fast enough, but sometimes it's hard to know if you’re buying the right one right now. Best Buy Canada has done an excellent job of that.
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Ricky, when we were in your Toronto store, you and I were talking about the “aha moment.” What drove you to digital originally, or how did you know that digital was going to have a major impact on your world?
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Hon: IV, digital has always been a part of Best Buy even before I joined – I've been with Best Buy more than 18 years now – but it was a very limited fashion on what we had. It was mainly to display an ad or promotion, etc. Then, in the early 2000s we were in the lab and turned a TV into a portrait – no one was doing this at the time. We realized this might actually work because, well, it does. The aspect ratio, it closely matches like an 8.5 x 11 from a paper sign to convert over to digital sign. However, it introduced a whole host of problems when we first did that, too.
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We laugh at it now. When we started approaching the OEMs and letting them know what we were going to do, everyone said we couldn’t do that, couldn’t warranty the panel, it was no, no, no. Then, beyond that, we looked at mounts. There was no such thing as a portrait TV mount back then, it didn’t exist. But, being Best Buy Canada, we did it anyway. It was nearly two thousands. When you look back at it now, we were one of the leading retailers to do something like that, and now, everyone has turned their TVs into portraits. These OEMs make a line of TV specifically for portraits now.
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Even though it took many, many years, it's like who has the last laugh now?
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Dickson: You just hit on something that I find fascinating, and it leads us beyond that original portrait conversation specifically to a display that you used for many years not only with digital, but also physical. Your role is this mixture of fixturing as well as digital interaction. When you have that knowledge-base and that team, all of a sudden you have a different understanding of how it might live inside of a store. Can you talk about the interaction of digital and using portraits?
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Hon: Just a little humor before we go further. I am also in charge of all the fixtures, the fixture designs, and all that in our stores. So there's a running joke inside of the company that if it doesn't fit, it's always my fault.
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Now, I’ll share one of our initial kicks of the can on how we showcase smart home products in our stores to be able to develop a system that can update itself about 80% of the time vs. going through a CMS vs. having some push content. While there's still a need for that, we tried to move away from that a bit due to a very simple reason: We wanted to be able to show pricing in our screens and also current reviews, as well.
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I can walk you through the display very easily. I believe we used a 20-inch touchscreen in landscape orientation in the fixture, where a customer would approach it and pick a smart home product. This was a time when no one knew much about smart home products. They would buy one of these, one of those, one of those, and then go home and realize they need three or four apps to do this one thing…and then that thing, and then that thing. There was a big gap in what the customers assumed what it was vs. what the reality of it actually is.
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We built this interactive site where a customer would select, let's say a Ring doorbell, for example. They push the Ring doorbell on the touchscreen, and everything on the touchscreen is pulled from our website with live data – it has all the reviews, stock information, and all that stuff. We would reformat it because we still firmly believe that a webpage experience should be slightly different from within a store, than it is in your home. When a customer picks the product on the touchscreen, the smaller 32-inch portrait will show either a looping video, information specific to that product, promotions, etc. Many customers saw this and thought it was enough because it had the information, but it's never enough for us.
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We decided to take it one step further to be able to future-proof the display a little because we had a very forward-thinking leadership crew and they gave me a lot of free rein. So we put in a 70-inch portrait TV on its own player. This one section alone has three players involved in it. Then, with the help of SageNet [inaudible 00:24:04] we're able to communicate and talk to all the players. If we go back to the Ring doorbell, that large portrait allowed us to have content that mimicked the door opening when a customer selected the Ring doorbell. It would show what you would see at your door with the Ring UI.
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As a preface, we did something like this to test out and help us solve for the other products that were coming online. For instance, where do we show a smart garage door opener? How do we show those automated sprinkler systems, or automated outdoor items? That's always been a unique challenge for a retailer – how to properly show the experience without bringing the outdoor indoor per se. It seems like there's a lot of content here, but in reality, we were able to mix and match by pulling from existing sources like the Best Buy site to put this together. It was an effective piece. Even though we've decommissioned this fixture now, it got a lot of usage and was pretty good.
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Dickson: You talked about future-proofing and visual enhancement of the space. It's not just a 20-inch touch where you can learn something about it. You can have that visualization that's more realistic, even though it's virtualized. It was almost a precursor to an AR experience that you might have. This is about building technology that not only fits the day you put it in, but also fits in a year or two years later, depending on how long you have it there.
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When we were chatting in Toronto, you mentioned that about 80% of what you see in a physical store – whether it's fixturing, digital, etc. – comes through the environment. That's important. Almost everything out there you know from a visual design perspective, where it's coming from.
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What's great about digital, the Best Buy Canada experience is very personal and engaging. People want to sit and see it. It’s even won awards for things like Dolby Atmos. But it's also educational and purposeful in the outcomes that it's getting.
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One of the experiences I’d like to share today is the audio receiver's wall and how you handled that from a digital experience. Another is the printer environment and buying print cartridges. In both of those scenarios it became about how to create more content with less, as well as getting education and value out of the content that you already have.
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Would you be able to talk about those two experiences, specifically?
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Hon: I'm fortunate to work for a company like Best Buy, where I do have a lot of customer insight data that comes through me, which gives a leg up on how to tailor the interactives – it’s a good resource to have. The receiver wall has large appliances that you see and then a little tablet. In reality, the backend system is very close to almost identical. We're able to use this platform to be able to push it in different directions. What we learned pretty quickly in receivers is how customer habits buy receivers. They buy by spec. Brand is not as important unless they're maintaining a certain ecosystem, but they buy by spec. You’d rarely hear someone ask for a Marantz 5.1 Atmos-whatever. Rather, they’re looking for a 5.1 receiver – that's how they go in and buy it.
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With receivers, that produced a big challenge because the shelves simply did not have enough space to produce a large tech display that showed all the receivers. It wasn't feasible to put all the boxes out either. But we still had our demos out. We placed them on a Lazy Susan so that customers can spin them around and see the back of the receivers, which is very important to them. We also have a touchscreen UI tablet that mimics the fixture in the layout, allowing the customer to select which receiver they want. The touchscreen then goes onto bestbuy.ca and pulls all the information that we need. There’s also a very robust product API, where the player would pull from there to be able to pull in the pricing.
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These are one of the areas, besides the planogram updates, where we have to update the first page, which is (for lack of a better word) just the JPEG. That is the only portion that we need to update on this unit – the JPEG and add the SKU information – then, everything else is pulled from the web and our API. It follows the initial template, which is how we get around and use digital to show pages and pages of specs and receivers. It’s how customers buy them, 100% bought by spec.
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The other challenge we had is the ultimate, always old ink wall. The ink wall sounds simple, but the programming behind it is quite intense because you can have one cartridge that works with 100 printers, and within that one cartridge there's a normal version, and then there's an Excel version that works with another 100 printers. Then, you have a cartridge with CMYK., so there's another 3-4 colors that you have to deal with. The database does get quite large.
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We haven't quite automated this one yet because we haven't found a proper data feed to actually pull. That being said, we have still maintained this on the same platform that we use everywhere else in the store. That’s not a secret, we use the BrightSign players. Every interactive experience you see in our store is run from a BrightSign player, 9.5x out of 10. The other half the time is usually another vendor that brings in their own display.
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Dickson: A few of the things to pick out there that are very important are that you are multiplying the experience level with your end customer through the use of web data. Although it looks different in-store than it does on the web environment, you're capitalizing on that data stream, which we've all talked about. That's the old conversation about omnichannel and having that, but that's a value proposition to be able to safely and accurately know that the data's going to be the same and right.
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To your point, when you look at something like the print wall, it’s complex. The database is big and the feed for that is not something that exists in the way that you want. You've got to manipulate around that, but having the third piece, consistency in delivery. Consistency in the types of technologies that you're using from a physical hardware and software perspective allow you to get creative in where the data comes from or what the content is vs. having to worry about what to do from a hardware infrastructure perspective. You know you’re going to put a bright sign there, what types of touch technologies you like, and what can be done from a bigger small screen for passive environments. That makes it easier to capitalize on that content discussion.
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That brings us to considerations. All these different areas look great when they get to the customer. One of the problems is when you dive into a digital experience initiative, all of a sudden this list of things that you have to maybe consider not only as a retailer, but we have to consider as your partner – this thing gets long and daunting if you're not prepared for it.
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As someone that is excited to see people capitalize on the real considerations that come down to this, Ricky can you talk a little bit about the raised floor experience? To preempt for the audience, Best Buy Canada took the time to understand how power distribution was going to work. If you've been into big box retail, you see cables coming down from the ceiling, there’s a plug here, or they have limitations of where power is available. Ricky and his team capitalized on this \"limitation\" to make it something that's wildly successful and flexible.
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Hon: In some of our higher-performing stores up in Canada about seven years ago, we underwent a transformation that gave us the opportunity to gut the store to the slab and start over. Our VP at the time got very sick of us saying no when they wanted to move the table over like five feet because there's no power. We had many discussions around how they’d like to move things and where, but couldn’t. He finally came to us and gave us a unique challenge: he didn’t want to see any top-down power, but also wanted to be able to move anything, anywhere. The first 5-10 minutes we were all freaking out.
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Then, when we started thinking about it and butting heads, we looked around and it dawned on us that the server room was already on a raised access floor, but they go about 36 inches deep as we don't need that. We looked at it and then started sneaking around in casinos because we caught wind that they're big on using that floor, and we realized maybe this could work for us.
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Once we looked at the floor and the accessories around it, the modular electrical network that came with the floor stood out to us. Now, in our stores today we have a raised access floor. It's only a three-inch cavity, but it's enough to run power and data because that's all we need. We don't run HVAC or anything like that. We needed a system that was able to be installed while the store was open. Those were the big considerations for us.
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From our VP standpoint, we were told at the last minute to do whatever we wanted, but the store had to remain open. After a while, we got good at it and would slip on an access floor under the store while it was open. There was always a big, unique challenge around that. From a modular electrical perspective, we no longer need to hire electricians because everything in the floor is pre-terminated – there are armored cables, basically a bunch of armored extension cords that are snaking through the store.
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There have been times where certain site conditions are wrong or whatnot, and a fixture needs to move five feet. Now, we don't need to bring in electricians. The store can simply pick up the fixture, move it five feet, then unscrew the tile with the duplex and move that with it. What used to take a day to do because the electrician needed to come in to decommission, move the fixture, and recommission, now takes 45 minutes.
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One of the big benefits was decommissioning of things because we had always struggled – it’s basically having power in the middle of nowhere with the pole coming out of the ceiling. How do you decommission that when you don't want to bring in a lift for one pole? It has some unique challenges. There are minor drawbacks that we see with the floor. We always have to be cognizant of weight loads and point loads on the floor – that’s the only thing we have to watch out for. But we've been doing it for so long, we work with the Apples, [inaudible 00:39:15] in the world, and we work well together to figure out how to securely mount fixtures onto the floor. There was a big learning process, but the access floor opened up a lot for us. We're able to power our [inaudible 00:39:33] in the raceways now, which we could never do before. We can power anything, anywhere we want, at almost any time.
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Dickson: That was the most telling for me: the experience in a big box retailer. When you walk in with the high ceiling, the augmented environment, it feels big and it feels expansive. One thing that was very evident to me in your store is that it feels much more down to earth. As big as the landscape is, it feels more in my line of sight, like there's at least a ceiling top, even though there's not. It's very front-and-center for where those fixtures are.
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From a power and infrastructure perspective, Intel was very telling. You feature an Intel unit towards the back of the store, right in the middle of the aisle. It's a three foot by three foot pedestal, has LED around it, and yet it's out in the middle of nowhere. That type of infrastructure is not possible without that type of sub-in infrastructure for things like power. It’s great.
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From a content perspective, you mentioned BrightSign. The idea of future-proofing some of this, how do you make that more flexible for the future? Over the 10-15 year relationship between Best Buy and SageNet, what are those things that drive how you build digital experiences? Not only today, but what has allowed you to grow the most in those 15 years in terms of infrastructure decisions that you made over the years?
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Hon: Wow, that's a loaded question.
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Dickson: The things that jump out at me are understanding fixturing, how fixturing and digital come together, and understanding the value of consistent backbone technology like BrightSign. How does the BrightSign Network help you? What are the support mechanisms that make that possible, whether that's from a content generation perspective or even from a physical support perspective, in terms of your relationship with SageNet?
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Hon: It's very simple. In Best Buy Canada we have a very small team that does what I do. In reality, there's only five of us. I lead a team of five, and we populate a little more than 80% of everything in the store. With that said, in that forefront, in our thinking and how we move forward in the future, because I don't think our headcounts are actually going to change much, it comes down to selecting a partner and having a relationship with a partner that is very transparent.
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I joke around about this, but it's very important to me that we're able to take the criticism from both ends. Sometimes we come up with crazy ideas, just absolutely nuts. We need a partner that can tell us when it just is not going to work. That's very important because of the openness and honesty, it speaks volume for us. In Best Buy Canada, we don't base our vendor partners on a transactional basis. We're in it for the relationship. Before SageNet, it was Convergent, you guys took them over and we had been with them a long time, 10-plus years. Now, you guys came in and it keeps us moving forward. That's how we look at that portion of it.
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Second, if we look at .22 Infrastructure, we have a raised access that allows us to do a lot. One of the nice things, and the benefit to being at Best Buy Canada, from an infrastructure perspective it is key for what I need to do. I don't mean strictly power, or strictly data. I mean the APIs – the product API, the pricing API, the website APIs – where we can always jack into live data. When the web team updates everything, it updates it without doing anything. That also stands back from the limited manpower we have to do that.
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I have to be careful what I say here, I still think CMSs are very important and there's a need for a CMS. We've been gung ho in the last eight years with all the information that's already out there on the web or that’s already produced from various departments. How do we jack into those and bring them into the digital experience? Now, we're not as reliant on a CMS. I can safely say, this was a pain point of mine, we're able to put pricing in. We could never do that a couple years ago. It was too much of a risk, too much of everything. Our only risk of pricing issues is when we lose the network, but we have backups for that. That's not an issue. That is the only challenge that we have because once the pricing team updates, and it’s jacked in directly, it updates all our stuff, too. We don't have much to worry about.
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That's huge. Infrastructure is very important. The biggest thing is creativity and thinking outside the box. Think of the example of the portrait TV – imagine if we listened, we'd be turning portraits maybe last year. We simply decided we're going to do it like it or not. We'll keep paying for these panels if they go down, put fans in the pictures, we'll do what we need to. Pushing that envelope is huge for what we do, especially since I work for a technology company that also sells technology. You have to be two steps ahead of what's out there. Think about how you're going to display it, how you're going to use digital for it.
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One of the big things about digital in our stores is that it's used multiple ways. TVs, for example, digital is used to make the TV shine. We need the content. No content is king, we need the content to be very dynamic, bright, vibrant because we're selling the TV. That's an important separation we have to think about. We have digital that serves the information, that's another way to use it. Then, there's all the other uses that are here and there. We have targeted things with certain screens when you pick up a product it knows what product you picked up and automatically targets you with that. For us, and for other folks out there with a small team, the key is to select a good partner to go with you on this journey because that will make it or break it for you.
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Dickson: We appreciate that, and we agree. That's a bidirectional relationship – you push us as much as we may push back on you.
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Jenkins: Thank you very much for that interesting, engaging discussion. You shared some great stories, anecdotes, and details there. Ricky, what are your thoughts on the concept of phygital?
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Hon: Phygital, that’s the physical and digital experience merging together. Without giving too much away, I can relate to this because we are working on things in the backend. I do believe this phygital is more of an AR-type way of doing it. It's just how do you merge the physical stuff with the digital. You either do it through AR, and I'm hoping that further years down the road we can do AR simply without the screen. I have seen technology out there that is getting closer and closer, which is very neat. That's the only way.
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I do feel that it is a very retail way of doing things because ultimately, let's go back to the basics. What are we doing? We're selling a physical product and then we wrap a digital container around it – that's essentially what we're doing. That is the bottom line. We're a retailer. We sell physical products. How do we make that product shine? How do we attract people to that product? It is through digital signs, through invoking an emotion or through AR, which will have huge legs in the retail world.
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Dickson: Phygital is something that's big for me. It is a term that is coming alive in the market space. Ricky hit on it very well around the idea of AR. The other thing is, and Ricky's really exemplary in this space already and has been for years, retailers have struggled over the years getting digital and physical build out of fixtures aligned. You've got fixture and store design over here, and you've got digital over here, and sometimes it doesn't match up. To Ricky's credit, his organization does all of that together. As he said earlier, if it doesn't fit it's his fault. That's a big piece of that phygital environment as retailers are continuing to get better at that.
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Jenkins: Brilliant. Ricky, are you doing anything with shelf edge and/or electronic shelf labels?
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Hon: In Best Buy Canada we rolled out digital price tags or ESLs in the last year or so. We stayed behind our brothers down south, they did it before us. We benefit from the integration because they did all the work already. When we got the tags up here, we started thinking about what we can do with this tag and looked at the technology within the tag. I'm a big proponent of this is our set of tools, how can we make our tools work? I'm not a proponent of we don't have this, let's get that, but let's do what we have.
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We looked at the tag, knew we were going to put QR codes on the tag, knew we were going to do this, knew the tags had a flashing LED feature on it. We started thinking about how to utilize a flashing LED. We're not quite there yet, but we may try and test out if most of our customers coming into our stores know what they want. A good eight out of 10 have already done the research before they come in, nowadays. My good challenge before was needing to maintain the customer for exactly 22 minutes and a certain amount of seconds in the store. It's the nature of the people, the nature of our customers, and what people are being inundated with. Everything's on demand and we have to cater to it. When it comes down to it, that's where it comes.
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We’re looking at how to utilize shelf labels. I know of other retailers who are dabbling in this as well. I want to put up a screen in the front of the store that allows a custom to say, \"I want to buy this one case for my Samsung phone.\" Then, they can actually select it because our planogramming system and mapping system also has an API, which I can hook into, and can geolocate within that store and pull up a map to exactly what fixture it's on. That will show the customer where to walk. Once the customer gets there, we can flash the tag with that product on the LED right away. Now the customer knows where to look on the four-foot section shelf as well.
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For us, how do you capitalize that? If we don't necessarily need to flash the product that he's looking for, we can flash the 6-7 other products that are compatible with his phone or device to also give him the options that he may not ever know. He may have known that this existed, but not in four colors. That's how we're using the shelf labels. Shelf labels have increased our QR code adoption from customers because our QR code adoption was non-existent basically, but it seems to have helped that growth.
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We are still playing with a lot of the digital price tags and toying with the tags.. To me, depending on the size of the tag, it's just a screen. There's more I can do with that. For example, I can go around and update our curbside pickup. You put a larger tag out there and it'll show the QI. We can always update what we want. These are just examples of things we think about. Basically, we want to push the shelf label not just to show pricing, but to push it in a new direction. We want to be able to push it so the customer's more engaged with it and we make the transaction time a lot quicker as well. To be able to have the customer find what they need right away, that's how they are looking at the shelf labels now.
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Jenkins: Such an exciting space with so many opportunities and so much potential around that. We are almost at time, so I'm going to invite you both to just leave us with some final thoughts, any recommendations, or best practices for anybody looking to get started on this digital experience journey.
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Hon: My advice to folks out there, and vendors too, is that I'm fortunate to be working for a company like Best Buy, who has a lot of resources that I need. I'm fully aware that not that many others out there have the type of resources that are available to me. One of the things when you're selecting and building a digital signage network is to just step back, have a look at what resources you have today, and start looking at it and how to utilize it. Then, start building your digital signage program around it. If you start doing that, you're already tailoring your digital sign to your own infrastructure. Let it be an API hook, or even as simple as getting power to the wall, some people struggle with that.
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It takes a lot to take a step back, look at your toolkit, what you can do with it, and how to push this toolkit to the limit before you need a new one. The new toolkit part is always a challenge for retailers, because that's new infrastructure, a new contract, maybe even a new platform, or maybe all of this, which we're not a fan of in reality. That’s why I’m always leveraging our web team, e-comm team, pricing team, consumer insight teams, etc. Over the past many years I've worked with them, we have built the APIs that can do everything we want right now in our stores. Even as simple as the center, the shelf labels, and do some wayfinding with it – we already have the infrastructure to do it. It's a matter of just tying it together now.
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Dickson: Innovation is not always something new. It ends up in something new, but many times that innovation is around: what are the pieces you have and how can you use them better? The other thing is finding partners for your organizations. It's important on both sides, for the retailer themselves as well as for a provider, such as SageNet or other partners that are out there. Listen to what the client is asking and what the end customer is asking. The end customer at Best Buy gets a great experience because Ricky and the team have done a very good job of listening and then implementing digital that is valuable to that.
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Jenkins: Thank you very much. It was a wonderful discussion. Thank you again, Ricky and IV for joining us today, and to SageNet for sponsoring this event. I hope you'll have a great rest of your day.
\r\n"},{"id":36898,"bundle":"related_content","title":"Related Content","content":[{"id":23812,"bundle":"article","title":"Pivotal Revelations on Digital Experience With Best Buy Canada","url":"/pivotal-revelations-digital-experience-best-buy-canada","summary":"On-Demand : Digital interactivity experts Ricky Hon (interactive display and design leader at Best Buy Canada) and IV Dickson (chief innovation officer at SageNet) discuss implementing a thriving digital experience for customers. ","teaserImage":{"url":"https://assets1.risnews.com/styles/secondary_articles_short/s3/2023-05/ris_webinar_960x540_sagenet_0523_copy.jpg?h=eaf15838&itok=S0OEKx23","width":360,"height":180,"alt":" Pivotal Revelations on Digital Experience with Best Buy Canada"}}]}],"renderGatingWall":true}};
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})();Best Buy Canada’s Innovative Digital Experience Breakthroughs
In the modern retail landscape, digital and store experiences increasingly go hand-in-hand. From virtual fitting rooms to inventory robots to BOPIS, there are numerous ways to transform stores through digital transformation, making it all the more important to spearhead digital initiatives and make sure they're tapping into the right technologies.
In a recent webinar, Ricky Hon, an interactive display and design expert at Best Buy Canada and IV Dickson, chief innovation officer at SageNet laid out the retailer’s digital signage journey. They discussed the meticulous process of designing, testing, and launching new initiatives, while also sharing advice for retailers who are embarking on their own digital transformation journeys.
In this edited webinar transcript, Hon and Dickson explore how Best Buy Canada's digital experience breakthroughs have shaped the company’s journey, providing customers with interactive and personalized experiences and driving business impact.