Best Buy Ditches Email, Switches to Online Chat But Failed to be Awesome. Why?

By Cheby Labrague 3 Comments

Rather than force the issue to better its wretched email support, Best Buy ditches email and switches to live chat instead in an attempt to be a superstar in customer service.

On Tuesday, STELLAService noted on its Happy Customer blog that the electronics retail player has eliminated the option for customers to email the company through a contact form in its customer service page and placed in its stead an online chat functionality.

Best Buy concurred that email is “unable to offer the same level of in-the-moment assistance” that a live chat tool can provide customers. This move by Best Buy mirrors the move by an increasing number of businesses that have added a live chat widget on their websites for customers to be able to reach them directly and get the assistance they want, when they need it.

Best Buy was far from dazzling in delivering quality customer service support through email. There’s a bunch of Best Buy email support “fails”, the most popular of which caught the nets of The Consumerist when a customer (a guy named Tom) sent in email exchanges with the company’s email support that showcased godawful customer service.

It could be embarrassing instances such as these that Best Buy swore never to be replicated in the future that it’s now placing its bet on live chat, who knows?

Best Buy’s Attempt to Becoming a Live Chat Superstar

The company is right in its words that email cannot provide the same level of in-the-moment assistance that online chat can do. But installing a live chat widget on their site that allows online chat between customer service reps and customers is only half the picture.

I tried my luck with Best Buy’s online live chat customer service from their global website and this is what I got:

Apparently, the live chat was not available at the moment. I sat it out for a few minutes constantly clicking on the gray “Chat Now” button that I swore I could’ve beat it out at the World Mousecliking Competition. All the sudden the button turned blue. My eyes twinkled! Finally!

By now, I was giddy with relief more than excitement. There’s a pre-chat form I’d need to fill out to connect to a chat agent.

So I did and held my breath… held on some more… had to breathe a wee bit for dear life… held it again… and… there aren’t any chat representatives currently available. By this time, I was ready to call it quits and I’m certain I’m not alone in this feeling. For time-conscious customers going through this can be rather exasperating.

It was told that Best Buy’s live chat performance was less than stunning – with only 5% success rate. Well, I guess I was part of the 95% unfortunate folks. Clearly a case of live chat benefits not quite reaped.

Update: About 20 minutes later I was able to chat with a live chat agent from Best Buy and, overall, it was rather an OK experience considering I got my questions answered.

Why Did Best Buy Fail?

Two factors come to mind after my first-hand experience with Best Buy’s live chat tool – Connectivity and Staffing. Both of them affect the Speed of delivering assistance, which is an important metric for customer satisfaction.

Best Buy is one of the biggest companies in the US. That means they have hundreds of thousands of customers, if not millions, who’ll need customer support at some point in time. That’s no joke. To be able to handle customer support at this scale requires huge effort which includes guaranteeing their online infrastructure is in place for people to be able to connect through live chat effectively.

But to my mind, staffing may be the major culprit. I’m not one to say how many live chat agents are on their roll but I have the impression it’s likely inadequate. Add to that my initial impression that I’m not the only one being handled by the agent on the other line because of the disconnect in the flow of the conversation shown below.

Obviously, I haven’t sent my inquiry yet. It could be the agent pasted a saved response on the wrong chat window (mine) and the last line is intended for another customer (the agent repeated that line to me way through our chat conversation when I asked if I can get a smartphone without a carrier – unactivated, no contract).

The replies also took a bit longer, averaging 5 minutes or so. As a customer, I was expecting the replies to come almost instantly, but for Best Buy’s standards I could be rather demanding.

The beauty of live chat is that you can multitask while chatting. For customers, that’s very convenient in contrast with putting all your attention to holding a phone up your ear. But it seemed like I wasn’t the only one multitasking. I wonder how many people the chat agent was assisting at that time while chatting with me. I hope not one too many.

It could also be that the “delays” I experienced was a connectivity issue – chat exchanges took some time to reach the other end and vice-versa and that the agent had actually been responding promptly to my chats. Well, there’s no way for me to know exactly at this moment. But one thing’s for sure: if Best Buy wanted to ace customer service in live chat, they should guarantee reliable connectivity, sufficient staffing and effective queue management.

Let this be a lesson to all of us who are using live chat on our websites or even those who are considering adding one.

Cheby Labrague

Cheby Labrague

Cheby writes about live chat insights, improving conversions, epic customer service, online marketing and everything in between. She will take you by the hand in exploring how to extend your website's earning power through Offerchat's smart live chat tool, and even smarter live chat people.