In his first months on the job, Mr. Joly visited Best Buy stores near the company’s Minnesota headquarters to ask rank-and-file employees about the struggles they encountered. (Among their gripes: an internal search engine that was returning bad data about which items were in stock.)

Best Buy fixed the search engine. It also restored a much-loved employee discount that had been suspended and embarked on an ambitious program to retrain its employees so they could answer questions about entirely new categories of electronics, such as virtual reality headsets and smart home appliances.

“The associates in our stores are much more engaged now, much more proficient,” Mr. Joly said.

Customers had always loved Best Buy’s Geek Squad, its army of specially trained tech support experts who could be hired to mount TVs and install other appliances at a customer’s home. But sometimes, people needed help before they bought big and expensive gadgets. So it started an adviser program that allows customers to get free in-home consultations about what product they should buy, and how it should be installed. The service started as a pilot program last year and is now being rolled out nationwide.

Best Buy has “really come through the valley by making investments around the customer experience,” said Peter Keith, a retail analyst with Piper Jaffray.

3. Turn brick-and-mortar into showcase-and-ship

When Mr. Joly arrived at Best Buy, the company’s online ordering system was completely divorced from its stores. If a customer placed an order on the website, it would ship from a central warehouse. If that warehouse didn’t have the item in stock, the customer was out of luck.

Mr. Joly realized that with some minor changes, each of Best Buy’s 1,000-plus big-box stores could ship packages to customers, serving as a mini warehouse for its surrounding area. Now, when a customer orders a product on Best Buy’s website, the item is sent from the location that can deliver it the fastest — a store down the street, perhaps, or a warehouse five states away. It was a small, subtle change, but it allowed Best Buy to improve its shipping times, and made immediate gratification possible for customers. Now, roughly 40 percent of Best Buy’s online orders are either shipped or picked up from a store.