How Best Buy is using generative AI to create better customer support experiences

At Best Buy, our purpose is to enrich lives through technology. We’re able to do this by focusing on meeting our customers wherever they are along their technology journey, offering a unique mix of advice, products, and services. Whether it’s in our stores, on BestBuy.com, through our app, or in customer homes, we’re here to help people understand all the possibilities that technology can offer them.  

That’s why we’ve partnered with Google Cloud and Accenture to help us further unlock the power of people, using generative AI to provide our customers with even more personalized, best-in-class tech support experiences.  

Convenient, personalized customer support 

One way we are bringing this to life is giving customers a self-service support option when they shop on BestBuy.com, through our app, or by calling our customer support line directly. Expected to launch late summer 2024, this new option will allow Best Buy’s U.S. customers to get help from a gen AI-powered virtual assistant. This assistant will help customers quickly troubleshoot product issues, make changes to their order delivery and scheduling, and even manage their software and Geek Squad subscriptions, and My Best Buy Memberships™. 

Making work easier for employees 

We also know that sometimes customers prefer speaking with an actual person to get the support they need. So, in the coming months we’ll also launch a new suite of gen AI-enabled tools to help our customer care agents better serve customers over the phone.  

The AI tools will help care agents assess customer conversations in real-time, providing them with in-the-moment, relevant and human-focused recommendations. At the same time, the tools will summarize conversations, detect sentiment and utilize data from the call to reduce the likelihood a similar issue will occur in the future.   

And for our store employees across the country, we’re working to develop a gen AI-powered assistant to provide easier access to things like company resources and product guides. This will allow them to help customers more efficiently than ever.  

We’re excited to bring these gen AI capabilities to life for our customers and employees by leveraging Google Cloud’s AI platform, Vertex AI and Gemini models. The future of retail is constantly evolving, and we’re committed to remaining at the forefront to serve our customers in ways no one else can.  

You can find all our customer support options at BestBuy.com.