Leader Spotlight: Leveraging AI to improve customer experiences, with Ashley Daniels

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Ashley Daniels is Best Buy’s Vice President of Omnichannel and People Technology Product Management. She has spent most of her career at Best Buy, where she started as a sales supervisor before moving into customer experience operations planning. Ashley later transitioned into managing quality and order management operations and has since held multiple leadership roles across omnichannel product management.

In our conversation, Ashley talks about how Best Buy utilizes AI to transform the contact center space and optimize customer experiences. She discusses how spending her early career in order management allowed her to learn about omnichannel in a transparent, holistic way. Ashley also shares how she empowers her teams to establish credibility and understand the big picture of the business.

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A foray into technology and product management

To start, could you talk about your responsibilities in your role as VP of Product Management?

I’ve been with Best Buy for almost 17 years, and it has been such a great journey. In my role, I manage various product teams across all different functions. The omnichannel component of my job includes all the tools we use for order management, home delivery, in-store sales, products for our Geek Squad and call center agents, and more. The people technology component is more about payroll, training, benefits, and our annual performance appraisal processes.

You didn’t begin your career in product management, so how did that transition come about?

I’m not a classically trained product leader — I actually fell into product management. I started my career in retail at Best Buy and, after a couple of years, I moved into the contact center space where I began managing our third-party contact centers. This was around the same time that we deployed a brand-new order management system. It was during the holiday season, so I was supporting the teams on the ground who, in turn, were supporting our customers. That was my first foray into technology.

When the holiday season ended, I was asked to lead order management operations. I ended up tightening some of those processes and eventually moved into a capability development role. We were using the waterfall methodology at the time, and that was the first time that I led a product transformation. It was really fun, and I learned a ton.

Did you have any hesitations about moving into product management without having a lot of ‘traditional’ technical experience?

Yes. When I was first approached about the opportunity, I told leadership, “I am not the right person for this job. I am not technical! Thank you so much, though.” I didn’t think I’d get energy from the role. The gentleman who asked me to lead the order management space then told me, “I think you can do it. You’re the person that I want for this role.” So, I took a leap of faith. That was almost 15 years ago, and I’ve been in technology ever since.”

Had he never tapped me, I never would’ve moved into technology. Sometimes, you have to step out of your comfort zone and trust that you can do hard things, especially when other people have that trust in you!

An evolving perspective on omnichannel

How did you move from product management to omnichannel product management, and what did that mean for Best Buy?

I was so lucky to have started in order management — I had the opportunity to learn about omnichannel technology in a very real way. This was 15 years ago, at a time when Best Buy was leading the industry, and I learned the ins and outs of how we fulfilled orders for customers. We were one of the first retailers to ship from stores, offer in-store pickup, and combine our retail and dotcom into one order management system. 15 years later, some companies still haven’t done that, so that was a great place for me to begin my career.

My later (and serendipitous) move from order management to the services role was such an eye-opener for me. I was managing all of our Geek Squad technology, and this really activated my enterprise mindset. I learned that the longer you stay in the same function, the easier it is to believe that that function is the center of the enterprise. That mentality can lead to a lack of understanding of other perspectives.

Now, the culmination of my work in omnichannel and managing different functions is our virtual store capability. With this, we’re meeting customers where they are. Customers can video chat with a Best Buy team member — who’s in a virtual store location — and view demos, even if they’re at home in their pajamas. It’s a very cool capability that pulls all of the functions from across the enterprise into one meaningful experience.

You mentioned how staying in the same function can stagnate your mindset. How did you evolve your perspective on omnichannel? Was it from talking to other stakeholders or performing the roles yourself?

My perspective on omnichannel evolved as I took on additional teams and roles. For example, I started working with the selling team and thinking about the selling experience across BestBuy.com and in our stores. We started to look at how we can seamlessly connect the two experiences for our customers. We also started serving up recommendations in-store and texting them to customers so they can transact on our website when they get home.

Using AI to accelerate outcomes

You worked with Google Cloud and Accenture to deliver AI-powered customer support at Best Buy. What was the thinking behind this product and how will it drive business value?

At Best Buy, we’re transforming the contact center space. This is a great area for AI to accelerate outcomes. As a customer, the amount of data available to you in a contact center space is huge compared to that of a retail environment. For example, chats and calls are recorded and summarized, and this data can be used to solve customer issues.

What we’ve seen in research is that customers don’t always want to talk to a human — they want to be able to resolve their problem at that moment as quickly as possible. Often, they want their problem to be so simple to resolve that they don’t need to engage with somebody. For us, this means that our success metrics at the top of the funnel are around how well our chatbot or interactive voice response (IVR) met their needs at that moment. And, of course, at the bottom of the funnel, we still have customers who need or want to engage with a human. We have deployed solutions to make those interactions better too!

What are some of the specific features you’re building to achieve this transformation?

We’re working toward an IVR experience that leverages natural language processing (NLP) so that when customers do need to speak to a human, our agents already know who the customer is and what they need. We’re completely transforming the contact center space so that it truly shows up for our customers. At the same time, we’re pulling back on the need for institutional knowledge and lifting a lot of mental weight off of our agents.

We’re also working on ways to use AI to detect if a call is escalating and if the customer is getting frustrated. Using the customer’s language and tone, we hope to build technology that supports our agents in the moment to de-escalate a situation or provide an actionable solution.

In general, contact center jobs are so hard. We want to make the job easier for our call center workers. In fact, I always tell people, “If you haven’t spent any time in your contact center, spend at least eight hours there. You’ll come out with a better understanding of your customers and business model.”

Creating a nimble and resilient organization

You’ve managed so many different teams at Best Buy. Because you have different people managing each one of them, how do you go about structuring them?

We’ve tried everything, from organizing by function to organizing by end-to-end process. Over time, we’ve learned that we have to see through both lenses. It’s important to think about the functions from an enterprise perspective, as well as the end-to-end processes that those functions live within. It’s also vital to be clear about who’s doing what and why.

For example, scheduling was an element that we went back and forth on. We debated whether or not we should utilize the same technology for scheduling in-home appointments to also schedule for one of our precincts in our stores. Even though some of the functionality of the two use cases was different, we weren’t sure how customers would react.

Ultimately, we concluded that customers didn’t care if we were using the same technology on the backend. It came down to whether or not we gained any synergy by doing so. This is why we now have a functional owner managing the end-to-end home delivery experience, as well as a functional owner managing scheduling.

There isn’t necessarily a perfect way to handle situations like this, so it’s important to create a very nimble and resilient team that’s willing to flex and try new things until you get it right.

How do you help your teams connect to that enterprise mindset and what does having that perspective mean for your teams?

I’m so passionate about this. I believe that every one of my product leaders — whether they’re product specialists or senior directors — needs to have a solid understanding of our business. And when I say “our business,” I’m specifically referring to how we make money, what matters to our customers, and the nuances of our business model. Even if they only own one specific feature, I want them to understand the big picture so that they can make strategic decisions.

We are really thoughtful about developing the team, and host crash courses when we see an opportunity. Over time, the team has matured because they’ve developed these foundational skills, such as operating income optimization and end-to-end financial acumen.

When you host these crash courses, do you implement a certain style or format? What do team members take away from these sessions?

We do our crash courses in an open environment that enables people to ask questions. They’re very conversational and they cover things that nobody would ever slow down and teach you. In my opinion, this is how someone truly gains the credibility to write business requirements. By establishing this credibility and understanding the business — including the financials — each team member can then earn their seat at the table. They become equipped to have a strategic dialogue and contribute in a meaningful way.

Aligning and empowering teams

Thinking about the breadth of your team, how do you align each of those teams to focus on the right priorities and understand the big picture?

Each of my senior director leaders has a functional area. For example, one of our leaders is responsible for care, so we lay out the key care metrics that we’re chasing at the beginning of the year. Some of these metrics include containment, average handle time, customer experience, etc. We get those framed up at the senior director level, but my teams are also using those goals to ground themselves throughout the quarter.

Each product area has metrics that are more granular in terms of how they contribute to lagging indicators. For example, if our self-service team wants to boost self-service from 10 percent to 40 percent, they’re defining OKRs every quarter that also align with the objectives set at the senior director portfolio level.

How do you build trust with your team and empower them to prioritize?

If you’ve created a world in which your team understands the customer pain points, the business financials, and the business in general, your team will know which levers they need to pull to drive the right outcomes. Assuming that you’ve helped your team build the muscle they need to pull those levers and they’ve pulled all of the right ones consistently, you can then trust them wholeheartedly to do their jobs independently while working toward goals.

Now, you’re no longer questioning them because of doubt, but because you want to back them up in conversations, elevate their work, and empower them to continue making those kinds of decisions.

This flips the script on leadership in terms of what things used to be like. A product team that lacks the enterprise mindset and true understanding of how to drive outcomes can’t prioritize effectively, and so you find senior leaders engaging top-down. Building the type of maturity that allows prioritization to happen at the team level requires a lot of work. If you’re talking about prioritization and you ask a critical question that the team can’t answer (or if the answer lacks the depth to make an educated decision), that’s an opportunity to grab a whiteboard and show them how you might model the impact.

Those have been some of the most meaningful moments in my career and the ones where I’ve seen my team grow the most. That’s how we build muscle.