(Note: This is part two of a three-part series titled “Lessons from Best Buy.” If you missed part one, I’d encourage you to start from the beginning. The story builds.)
When you build a system designed to lie to your customers, don’t be surprised when your customers stop trusting you.
I want to be clear about something before I tell you this story. I did everything right.
I needed my iPhone screen repaired and, before making the trip, I decided to call my local Best Buy to ensure the part was in stock. Seems reasonable, right? I didn’t want to waste an hour of my day driving across town for an appointment that couldn’t actually be fulfilled. Pretty basic stuff.
Here’s where it started to get interesting. When I called the number for my local store, I couldn’t reach anyone there. Turns out, every call gets automatically routed to an overseas call center. There is no direct line to the actual store. None.
Fine. Not ideal, but I’ll work with it.
I connected with a representative, gave them my phone model, described the problem, and specifically asked them to confirm that the store had the screen in stock before I booked anything. The representative assured me it did. Appointment made. I showed up.
The store didn’t have the part.
The employee who greeted me was genuinely apologetic, and, to his credit, he didn’t try to spin it or minimize it. He just told me the truth. That same high-pitched alarm was still going off in the background every thirty seconds while he talked. (If you missed part one of this series, trust me, circle back. It’s worth the context.) There was something almost poetic about that. The unresolved problem from the first visit was literally the soundtrack to everything he was about to tell me.
He explained that the call center employees are evaluated on a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) for call handling time. In plain terms, they’re measured on how fast they get through calls. Speed is the goal. Move to the next customer.
So, what happens? They tell you whatever you need to hear to end the call. They don’t verify inventory. They don’t check with the local store. They confirm, reassure, book the appointment, and hit their number. Then the local store gets to deal with the customer who drove across town based on information that was never actually verified.
I stood there and let that sink in for a second. The alarm went off again.
I want to ensure that lands properly, because I think it’s easy to read that and assume it’s just a Best Buy problem. It isn’t. What happened to me that day was not an accident, a communication breakdown or an isolated bad experience. It was the entirely predictable result of a measurement system that was designed, whether intentionally or not, to prioritize the wrong thing: speed over accuracy; volume over resolution; the metric over the customer.
Here’s the question I’d challenge every leader reading this to ask honestly: What are your metrics actually rewarding?
Not what you intend them to reward. Not what the business case said when you rolled them out. What behavior are they actually producing on the ground, today, in the moments when your customer is on the other end of the line or walking through your door?
When you measure handle time, you get fast calls. You also get customers who were told what they wanted to hear.
When you measure appointment volume, you get a full calendar. You also get customers who show up to find out the appointment was a waste of time.
When you measure cost reduction in your customer service operation, you get lower overhead. You also sometimes get an overseas call center with no connection to your local stores and no accountability for the experience they create.
I’ve been guilty of some version of this myself. It’s genuinely easy to build systems around what’s convenient to measure rather than what actually matters. Revenue is easy to track. The customer who quietly decided not to come back is invisible. Call volume shows up in a report. Trust doesn’t.
The people in that call center weren’t villains; they were employees doing exactly what their performance system asked them to do. That’s the uncomfortable part. The problem wasn’t their character. It was the system someone built above them and the priorities it communicated, whether anyone intended it or not.
Your customers are not experiencing your intentions. They are experiencing your systems.
Take a hard look at what you’re measuring. Ask yourself if the behaviors those metrics reward are those you’d be proud of if a customer described them back to you out loud. Because somewhere in your organization right now, there may be an employee hitting every single target you set for them while quietly burning down the trust you worked so hard to build.
When you build a system designed to lie to your customers, don’t be surprised when your customers stop trusting you.