GameStop connects company-wide workforce with digital platform

GameStop is creating operational transparency for store associates, corporate managers and help desk personnel.

In a session at the recent NRF 2024 “Big Show” in New York, Matt Goodfriend, senior manager, learning and development, GameStop, explained how the retailer seamlessly integrated disparate parts of its enterprise using the Yoobic digital workforce platform.

“We were dealing with a disconnected tech stack,” said Goodfriend. “The ability to bring all of those solutions together into one seamless integration with things like real time analytics, and ability to make those finding actionable, was clunky with prior tools. It was like an email server. tasking was limited and visibility for our district and regional level was limited to is it done or is it not done?”

Seeking to provide corporate headquarters with in-depth visibility into store-level activities while also enabling enterprise tasking, communications and learning in a single place, GameStop decided to implement the Yoobic platform. Goodfriend cited the ability to customize the platform to align with GameStop’s branding as one advantage.

“Our leaderboard is truly a leaderboard,” he said. “It's styled like an arcade leaderboard screen. Our prior platform was essentially just glorified PDFs and quizzes. Now, we have actual interactivity and the ability to implement real learning management tools.” 

In addition, GameStop is beta testing a new machine learning (ML)-based Yoobic chatbot tool called Neo Assistant that enables employees to ask questions about store policies and procedures (such as dress code and product return processes). The chatbot provides a short answer and can connect employees to the approriate reference documents for more details. Yoobic Neo will learn from assoicate feedback and enhance the quality of the answer over time.

GameStop also utilizes a platform feature called Questions that lets employees ask questions and crowdsource the answers with information from fellow workers.

The retailer deployed the Yoobic platform across 22,000 employees in four months. According to Goodfriend, taking a document and generating a course once took 15 to 20 hours of effort, but GameStop can now develop an employee course with 5% of the work previously required.

“We have just started into some testing around doing things not only with a store operating procedure guide, but level zero / level one tech issues, customer service issues, things like that,” said Goodfriend. “We gained the ability to not only give them an answer but give them a resource to use if there are further questions. This has been really crucial. And we are projecting about a 70% reduction in calls into our customer service desk.”