Improved customer experience by reducing transfer rates by 1.5% to 2% and accelerating time to resolution
Accelerated customer experience enhancements by compressing development cycles from months to weeks
Increased call containment by more than 50% through AI-powered self-service experiences
Best Buy uses Google Cloud AI to transform customer care, boosting call containment by over 50% and speeding up updates.
Best Buy uses Google Cloud AI to transform customer care, boosting call containment by over 50% and speeding up updates.
Extending customer care to
digital and voice channels
Best Buy is transforming its retail experience. The company aims to bring the quality personal service of its physical stores to digital and voice channels, so customers can purchase with confidence and quickly get help if they need it. Accomplishing this requires rethinking ideas about self-service and how service representatives work with customers to resolve issues.
To support this change, Best Buy used Google Cloud to link its customer records with its internal knowledge bases, including company policies, troubleshooting articles, and product repairs. Bringing all this information together helped daily operations run more efficiently while making it easier to deliver fast, helpful results for customers.
To bring the highly personalized, consultative excellence of our in-store expert experience to digital and voice storefronts, we needed to radically change our approach to innovation. Google Cloud enabled us to make this shift.
Maureen Spence
Senior Director of Product, Best Buy
The company deepened its relationship with Google Cloud, including working with Google Cloud Consulting, to build an AI-powered foundation to support the company’s current and future goals for customer experience.
Fixing problems faster with flexible AI tools
With Google Cloud, we can extend our in-store experience to all our customers, whether online or on the phone. The technology gives Best Buy new ways to delight both customers and our employees supporting them.
Maureen Spence
Senior Director of Product, Best Buy
Best Buy deployed Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience to use AI to enable seamless customer journeys from purchase through to support. The platform allows internal Best Buy teams to build conversational voice and chat agents that bypass legacy text-to-speech processing layers, making conversations feel more natural. CX Agent Studio makes it faster and easier to deploy the AI agents and cuts traditional 18-month software development timelines to 3-6 weeks.
Underpinning the environment is Gemini Flash, a voice-native audio model that drives Best Buy’s automated computer troubleshooting experience.
Through flash-enabled virtual assistants, customers can explain problems in their own words to more quickly resolve issues by themselves. For instance, if they call because their laptop isn’t working, the assistant helps determine if it’s a software or hardware issue and walks them through the fix if possible. Transfer rates have dropped by 1.5% to 2%, freeing call center staff to focus on more complex issues.
Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience enables Best Buy to achieve two critical goals: deliver self-service to callers and support customers who need to speak to a person by ensuring they have the necessary background to quickly assist them.
BigQuery acts as a critical secure storage foundation, including capturing 100% of the logged customer voice and chat interactions. Best Buy can quickly analyze data from every call, such as filtering the most frequent products needing support. Teams use these insights to address issues with product deliveries, product functioning, and other areas impacting customer experience.
Staying at the leading edge of
technology innovation
To keep up with evolving customer needs, Best Buy set out to launch new AI tools faster. Migrating to a prompt-driven architecture reduced development timelines from months to weeks. Teams tested, iterated, and rolled out updates quickly. The speed improved operations. Virtual assistants drove a 50% increase in call containment. Customers handled routine tasks without needing assistance.
Automation doesn’t replace staff. Instead, it enables teams to focus on higher-value customer services. While AI handles routine questions, employees focus on complex issues. Generative Knowledge Assist listens to conversations and presents troubleshooting documents on agents’ screens in real time, so they can respond immediately.
Google Cloud is a strategic partner not only because of the solutions it provides but also because of Google Cloud Consulting and the knowledge that team brings to the conversation. That relationship is vital because AI technology is advancing so fast.
Maureen Spence
Senior Director of Product, Best Buy
Because all interaction data is stored in BigQuery, Best Buy can analyze the data to determine why customers call. Teams share insights across the business to fix product issues. The result is an improved quality review structure, where managers provide personalized training to human agents. In the future, Best Buy will expand this AI framework across its voice and chat ecosystems.
Best Buy’s purpose is to enrich lives through technology. Its unique combination of tech expertise and human touch meets customers’ everyday needs, whether online, in stores, or in homes.
Industries: Retail and Consumer Goods, Consumer Electronics
Location: Richfield, Minnesota
Products: Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, Gemini Flash, BigQuery, CX Agent Studio, Google Cloud Consulting
