Damien Harmon
Executive Vice President, Omnichannel at Best Buy
Thank you, Corie. It's great to be here with you today to talk about our accomplishments and our plans for this year and beyond across our Omnichannel portfolio. As Corie mentioned earlier, Omnichannel retail is a critical component of our strategic ecosystem. It's the most direct way to connect our strategy to the needs of our customers and employees.
Let's look at the last two years before we dive into where we're going. These last two years have challenged our employees in ways we could have never imagined. Powered by our strategic investments, we were able to serve our customers' needs and grow the business. There are two areas I want to highlight. First, the connection between our online sales, which expanded to 34% of our total Domestic revenue, and the 150% growth we've seen in our virtual interaction across video, chat and voice. Today 84% of the Best Buy customers use digital channels throughout their shopping journey. These virtual opportunities have created new ways for us to offer customers the immediate ability to shop with an expert wherever they are. Second, and also connected to our customers using digital channels throughout their shopping journey, is we've seen a 72% growth in customers who are using our app while in our stores. This also creates an opportunity for us to build more digital e -- interactions and technology-related solutions to support their needs. These numbers are amazing. We could not be more proud of our teams and how they've delivered. Just as importantly, it gives us an incredible foundation for continued growth and optimism as we look to the future.
Now, from an Omnichannel perspective, we look at the combination of customer experience, loyalty, plus operating efficiency. The two main drivers of that, and what I'm going to talk about today, are how we optimize our workforce and reimagine our physical presence in ways that serve our customers' needs in an ever-growing digital world. Our focus is on further developing our teammates to give them the skills to help customers inside and outside of our stores. But more importantly, do any number of digital channels that are at our customers' fingertips. At the same time we will optimize our store portfolio and as Matt mentioned, we will maintain the trend of closing 20 to 30 stores per year. However, with online penetration growing so rapidly in the last two years, we're making investments in our stores to provide a better, more seamless shopping experience as customers move from online shopping to visiting our stores, to video chatting from their home.
So I'll start with our people. We have significantly improved efficiency and productivity of our store labor model. We've seen a more than 100 basis point improvement in store domestic labor expense as a percentage of revenue compared to FY20. We've also materially increased store productivity over the past two years. We've done this by recently our teammates and making investments that lean into physical and digital shopping experience. A few examples include our fulfillment improvements, consultation labor, and our virtual store. This allows us to leverage our employees more effectively inside and outside of our stores. The great news is that as we made these adjustments, we maintained a strong NPS in our stores. These investments in our people have allowed us to help them learn new skills, grow their careers, gain flexibility, and realize their dream by keeping them with us longer.
We've increased our average wage rate 20% in the last two years, by raising our minimum wage to $15 an hour and shifting some of our employees into higher skilled, higher paying roles. In fact, our average wage for our field employees this year will be over $18 an hour. Since we've started our flexible workforce initiative in 2020, 80% of our talented associates are now skilled to support multiple jobs inside and outside of our stores. And we're proud of the fact that our field turnover rates remain significantly below retail average and are near our pre-pandemic turnover rates. Overall, we're in a place we like right now. We're becoming more efficient without losing sight of delivering amazing experiences for our customers and our employees. We're going to continue to strike the balance between spend and productivity as we look at the factors that I've just outlined.
Now, an obvious differentiator for our workforce is our Geek Squad team, which continues to deliver an experience that creates repeat customers, builds trust, and drives an incremental spend. As I showcased earlier, we had nearly 21 million service interactions across in-store and in-home services. We've significantly expanded our repair capabilities in categories that are important to customers' everyday lives, like mobile phone repair. This work is expanding our customer base. In fact, 35% of our mobile phone customers are new or reengaged with Best Buy. This is enabled by a technical workforce that has an average tenure of almost nine years and a retention rate at 86%, no one can match that level of expertise at the scale we can. That's huge.
That tenure has helped us produce fantastic NPS results in-store, in-home and through our remote support. And after we completed the repairs, customers spend 1.7 times more and engaged 1.6 times more often across all Geek Squad services. Geek Squad will be a vital part of our Totaltech initiative and we'll continue to offer standalone services that matter to customers, deepen those relationships and drive frequency.
Our customers are also leveraging our expertise through consultations as well both inside and outside of our stores. These consultations provide a direct access to customers for our ever-growing set of experts. Employees who have the skillsets to complete a consultation has grown by 78% last year and with each consultation, we can inspire what's possible. Customers spend 17% more across their lifetime value and they purchase more often when engaged for a consultation. Customers are loving this experience and we're seeing strong NPS. When surveyed, 92% of customers said they will likely continue working with our expert. And when customers engaged with one of our consultants or designers, they shopped with Best Buy two times more frequently. So looking ahead, we believe our annual consultations will grow by more than 200% by fiscal '25.
As you saw earlier, we have 45 million virtual interactions across all channels, creating opportunities to engage our customers differently. We're excited about our virtual store, which just launched last fall. To date, our virtual store in comparison to historical chat experiences is generating higher close rate, higher sales, and a 20% improvement in customer satisfaction, and that's not all. Our vendors are extremely excited about it as well. We started with 17 vendors on board and we will end fiscal '23 with over 60 vendors investing in our virtual store. This is an investment in us and they believe that we're creating a totally differentiating experience. We're expanding our virtual store and adding more categories like appliances and home theater. And we expect our virtual sales interactions to double by fiscal '25.
So let's talk about ways we are reimagining our store in support of our physical and digital shopping experiences. We are very excited about the things that we're testing, learning, and in some cases, implementing in our stores. First, let's talk about our experiential store. In 2020, we launched a test in one of our Houston stores and added two additional locations since then. Some of the key enhancements include dedicated showcase spaces for some of the new category as Jason mentioned earlier like e-transportation, outdoor living, fitness; we expanded our Microsoft and Apple shops and dedicated more space to premium experiences like appliances, home theater and audio; we expanded our Geek Squad presence for more customer interactions and space for repair services; and we've also enhanced fulfillment capabilities to include exterior lockers, additional space with shipping, packing, and fulfilling from our store warehouses, and we're excited about the performance. We've seen a 370 basis point improvement in NPS. We've seen a steady lift in customer penetration in the retail trade area, as well as overall customer spend. And we expect to continue to see strong revenue lift in these experiential stores and we will remodel 50 locations in fiscal '23 and about 300 locations are expected about fiscal '25.
Now, I want to highlight our 60 outlet stores that are open-box, clearance, end of life, and otherwise distressed large product inventory across major appliances and televisions, which might otherwise be liquidated at a significantly lower recovery rate. These outlets unlock value by alleviating space and capacity from our core stores and they are an important element of our circular economy strategy, providing a second opportunity for products to be resold instead of ending up in the landfill. In FY '22, gross liquidation recovery rate is almost two times higher than alternative channels. These locations are attracting new and reengaged customers. 16% of customers are new and 37% of customers are reengaged. In FY '23, we will double the amount of outlet stores and we'll test expanding our assortments by adding computing, gaming and mobile phones.
As we discussed last year, we launched a test in Charlotte of a new holistic market approach. And as I mentioned earlier, the ways people are shopping today are entirely different than how they shopped two years ago. And our stores and the way they operate, need to change and adjust accordingly. This work in Charlotte is a manifestation of the shopping evolution and this pilot leverages all of our assets in a full portfolio strategy across stores, fulfillment, services, outlets, consultation labor, and we bring it all together with our digital app. Within the test, we are looking at how a variety of store formats across 15,000, 25,000, and 35,000 square feet locations can serve a customer's needs, and this summer we will be introducing a 5,000 square feet store into the marketplace.
When you look at the before and after map of the Charlotte market, you can see, we have reduced our overall square footage by 5% and yet we've increased our customer coverage in the marketplace from 76% to 85%. We've also added 260 access points where customers can get their gear and employee delivery covers nearly half of the Metro. So looking ahead, we'll be focusing on using this market to learn in fiscal '23 before we make decisions on what the scale or what not to.
Technology enhancements are at the center of many of the changes I just mentioned. From self-checkout to virtual store, technology supporting our teams and customers in new and exciting ways. Take a look at this video to see what we're doing.
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As you can see, technology brings it all together in support of our optimized workforce and how our physical location will enhance the shopping experience inside and outside of our stores. We're excited about this year and our future as we focus on the combination of customer experience, loyalty, plus operating efficiency.
Now, I'd like to turn it over to our President of Best Buy Health, Deborah Di Sanzo.
