40 Minutes To Pick Up An Order at Best Buy

I just spent 40 minutes at Best Buy to pick up a CD that I had already paid for via bestbuy.com. I thought I was getting a good deal, until all of that time evaportated. It’s an infringement of my flerbage!

I just sent the following to Best Buy’s customer service:

Why does it take 40 minutes to pick up an online order?

I received a card in the mail with a digital coupon and decided to try the web site. I ordered a CD. When I went to pick it up (from the Ann Arbor, MI store), the person at the front told me to go to Media to pick up my order. I asked someone in Media, and he asked someone else who said I should go to customer service.

I asked someone in the customer service area and they pointed me to the Financing desk. That has to be the worst possible place to process online orders from, because credit applications take time… I was waiting behind two people who had credit applications to go through. After that, the clerk tried to figure out what to do with my order and called up Inventory. Inventory never responded. After a while, another blue shirted employee came up. She tried calling inventory and then looked at some info on my printout of my order and ran off somewhere, never to be seen again. Finally, the Finance clerk got someone from Inventory on the line and a few minutes later they came out with my CD. Someone from Returns and Exchanges handled the processing of the order (with the help of yet another employee).

I see no efficiencies or customer convenience in spending 40 minutes of my time and requiring 8 employees just to get a CD that was already paid for.

Some operational suggestions:

– Make sure that the greeter at the front of the store knows who handles online orders

– If customer service is the right place to handle it, make sure that *everyone* at that counter can deal with it so that people don’t waste a lot of time waiting when they just need to pick something up.

– perhaps online orders can be worked into the standard cashier line somehow? Ideally, though, it should be *faster* to pick up an online order than to grab the items off the shelf and go through checkout.

If you aren’t serious about doing store pickup of online orders *TAKE IT OFF YOUR WEBSITE*. If you are serious about doing it, then do it right.

For the sake of comparison, I should place an order online at compusa.com and see how they fare. CompUSA in Ann Arbor is two stores over from Best Buy.

Thanks for your attention, and I do hope you can fix this process.

Kevin

Thank God for competition. CompUSA, as I mentioned in my note, is two doors away from Best Buy. It’s about a 10 minute drive to Circuit City. It’s also about 5 minutes to Media Play, but that is getting sucked into the vortex that is Best Buy.

Don’t get me wrong… I generally like Best Buy. For what I want, their selection is good and their prices tend to be good. I’ve never thought much of their customer service (it’s often hard to get them when you need them) and their checkout lines tend to be on the slow side. But, I’ve had many acceptable shopping experiences there. Let’s just hope they can fix this online/offline disconnect.