Best Buy Apps

The Idea

A number of months ago, some of the pioneering folks inside Best Buy had a vision to extend some of the things our employees do every day to the digital space.  While that statement may be brilliantly generic, this idea has specific goals, and I don’t think the execution being built against it is generic at all.

Specifically, the idea centered on leveraging technology to help “you” know all we know as fast as possible. That sounds a lot like Twelpforce, or, what we do in the store, or on our phones, or in our Community Forums every day.  The problem is, we’re sharing that information within silos or on a platform, and it’s not accessible to everyone. We want to change that.  We want to consolidate some of these channels to expose the stuff we’re talking about, and information we share every day.  This tool we’re building is an mini-social engagement platform / knowledge resource center, and it will do three things when complete:

1. Create a new way to engage with customers where they need us to be
2. Connect our employees to each other in new ways
3. Allow the collective “us” to share our knowledge amongst ourselves easier, as well as with our customers.

So here we are, just beyond the one year anniversary of the introduction of Twelpforce.  To say something like “What a year” seems like an understatement.  It’s took a tremendous amount of effort to implement a program like this, and we’ve found that there’s an equal amount of effort required to maintain, and grow the program.  But it’s really rewarding work.  The credit goes to the men and women that make up our Twelpforce team for taking this seed of an idea, and growing it into what it is today.

What our people have done is go a long way towards demonstrating not only to our customers, our organization and to the world, that empowering people with the right tools, in the right place, at the right time can work.  They have been the ones innovating in ways we never dreamed of, proving our hypothesis that if there’s a will, there’s a way.  I also think it’s been fun to see other companies realize that they can effectively communicate via Twitter as well.  I’m proud that we’ve broken some new ground, and look forward to breaking new ground again soon. Finally, I think this effort has gone a long way in rooting “social” as something the organization will see as a key element in truly building relationships with consumers in a open, transparent and public manner.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking about the past lately. In particular, I’ve been thinking about my grandparents. They are getting up there in age, and as I move through my life, I am glad they are around to talk to, and give me perspective on some of the things I go through as I live my life. It got me thinking that it would be fantastic if my kids could tap into them as I have, but I worry they won’t have the chance. Life has a tendency to be funny like that, in that the amount of time those generations overlap is limited.

What about in the future? Will my grandchildren have this same problem? If you think about it, why would they? Everything I do these days is left for the world to see in the form of a digital footprint. All my tweets, facebook posts, photo albums, blog entries…it’s all going to be searchable in the future. “Googling Grandpa” might be able to tell them a lot about the kind of person I am (was?) since everything I do is being saved forever for posterity. I’m not kidding myself that I will be a hot Google topic when I’m 90, but for my grandkids, they may get a kick out of it. They may be the only ones who care about that level of detail by the time I’m ready to get off this rock.

3/22/10 – John Bernier (@bernierjohn)

Connections:

As the Twelpforce Lead for Best Buy, I’m very interested in where people think we can improve the experience we’re offering in this space. One issue in particular that I’m paying attention to revolves around how well we’re linking the experience people have online with the kind of experience they have in-store. Are they the same? Are they different? What’s at the root of any difference?

Why am I paying attention? Well, these days, it’s not uncommon for customers who have a poor experience with a brand to reach out to their social networks to vent/complain.  Just how powerful can one experience be? Well, I’m not sure who hasn’t seen this yet, but this article is one of many that summarizes how Kevin Smith, AKA “Silent Bob”, was removed from a flight by Southwest Airlines in early February of 2010. He disagreed with their actions, and took to Twitter to vent his frustrations. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/16/entertainment/la-et-kevin-smith16-2010feb16

He’s got 1.6M followers, and makes the case that a platform like Twitter is a perfect way to “get the word out” about a poor experience…However you want to look at it, it’s a sign that the customer has more control over their experience than ever.

Here’s a quick list of the 10 things I think I’ve learned thanks to Twelpforce

1. Enthusiasm and Passion are traits common to all our employees, and especially those who help via Twelpforce. These DNA traits seem to be shared across platforms, and is a key reason Twelpforce is working.

2. If we don’t know what’s wrong with our business, you can safely leave it to our customers to tell us. Like millions of canaries in the coal mine, it’s a beautiful thing to be able to listen so closely.

3. Trust is a fragile thing. Proving your worth every day is hard. Admitting we’re (I’m) not perfect no matter how hard we (I) try is humbling. The effort is very, very worth it though.

4. Talking about technology comes easily, but finding the answers to all the different questions consumers have can be hard when the info lies in so many different places within our four walls.

5. Sometimes I wonder if the anonymity that is offered online allows people to shed any guilt that comes with talking to people in a way that they would never consider in person.

Recently, I was sitting at my optometrist’s office, and noticed that their office had laid out issues of ‘Life’ magazines dating to the 1950’s for patients in the waiting room. How cool is that? As I was reading through them, it struck me as ironic that many of the same issues people were concerned about back then are the same issues we’re concerned about today such as; the military, health care and government (I’m generalizing, as my point isn’t about politics).

But what also struck me as different was the advertising, and how different it is from what we’ve grown accustomed to seeing. The tone in which “brands” spoke to customers was very direct. You should smoke these cigarettes so you’ll be as cool as Arnold Palmer. Or, “this car company” is a brand you can trust because we supply the most aftermarket parts. There are other examples, but the main thing I took away is that these brands were spending a lot of time, effort and money telling consumers why they should trust them, much as brands these days do.

As one of the Twelpforce leads, one thing I’ve learned so far in this journey is that there are a lot of companies who are very interested in what we’re doing. To-date, I’ve had conversations with our Best Buy Canada and UK teams, the CarPhone Warehouse team, as well as with other major corporations like HP, Home Depot, CarMax and Turbo Tax. I’ve been happy to share my POV on how we did this, and when boiled down, most people want to know how we got “Leadership Buy-In”.

In our case, leadership was already convinced that “social” was a way for us to change the way brands and humans interact. How we did it was still up in the air, but admittedly that leadership “got it” gave us a head start. When I relay this information, I also usually pair it with the comment that any Senior Leader who doesn’t know that conversations are happening about their brand, or their product in the social space shouldn’t be in their leadership position anymore. Seriously.

UPDATE 8/5: Some people may have mis-read the intent of the note below. To be clear, we are not worried about these accounts participating in the Twelpforce initiative. What we’re trying to do is use the tools we have on hand (the Twelpforce network) to root out and expose “brand squatters”. Brand Squatters are people who are not associated with Best Buy, but create accounts that look a lot like they are. Most big brands will battle this issue, but we decided to tackle it head on to help our customers understand that not everyone out there is who they say they are.

With the recent launch of Best Buy’s Twelpforce, there has been a wave of people SO excited about the initiative that they decided they wanted to be a part of it…however, these people aren’t a part of Best Buy.  We’re flattered, but we also don’t think it’s right that they could be taking advantage of YOU, and using our brand to do it. So, in an effort to expose these accounts so you know exactly who you are dealing with when navigating Twitter, we’ve compiled a handy list for you to digest.  We’ve sent the same list to the kind folks at Twitter, and while we expect them to be shut down soon, until they are, please, avoid doing business with these people….!

twitter.com/twelpforce

It’s been just over a week since the launch of Twelpforce, Best Buy’s new Twitter based customer service platform, but it seems like we’ve been doing this forever!  As one of the Leads for Twelpforce, I play sort of an Air Traffic Control role, and since it’s soft launch on 6/19, let me tell you, it’s been a fantastic experience so far.  One of my first learnings was that we need to be OK with the fact that there’s simply no way to organize an effort like this behind closed doors.  I started comparing it to getting dressed in a glass house.  Everyone sees everything