Posted August 26th, 2010 by joshkahn
Given the choice, most people would choose to take recommendations from a concierge rather than a circus barker. It’s not about ‘what’ they recommend; it’s about ‘how’ they recommend. Side by side, the recommendation from a concierge vs. a circus barker is perceived by the recipient in different ways.
A concierge asks questions.
A circus barker recites a static script.
A concierge listens.
A circus barker puts on his best smile.
A concierge taps her experience and past customer comments to make recommendations.
A circus barker SELLS the attractions with enthusiasm, volume, and jazz-hands.
A concierge is trying to find the destination so that your night out fits your mood.
A circus barker wants your butt in a seat.
It has been a guiding principle of the Emerging Channels mobile app team to build applications that behave like a concierge. We want the applications to get better with use. We want them to learn your preferences. We want them to provide added convenience. We want them to enhance your shopping experience.
In the latest versions of the Best Buy android and iphone apps, we’ve included a brand new way for users to compare products that we felt gets us closer to a concierge experience.
Posted August 23rd, 2010 by JohnB
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.
Posted August 22nd, 2010 by Cam Gross
An experimental team building an experimental app.That’s the one sentence description for how the Best Buy Iphone app (and Android app) came into being.
Large corporations like Best Buy are typically not known for their ability to experiment; or their tolerance for failure. They’re especially not known for their expertise in software design and development. In this sense our iPhone app project was really something of an anomaly. The project got started more than 18 months ago as an experiment with the realization that being involved in the mobile app world would be an important connection point between Best Buy and its customers. Indeed, the development team responsible for it’s creation was started as yet another experiment. Two experiments wrapped in an anomaly.
Build instead of buy
Best Buy, for better or worse, often chooses to buy solutions to it’s software challenges rather than to build them. Building software inside such a large organization with need to access key data systems can be a tough mountain to climb. This dynamic in particular added a large element of risk for us to put this team together. Our counterpoint to that risk was to organize in a way that leveraged trust and expertise and maximized the responsibility of each member. This model has led to some successes and certainly some failures but ultimately has led us to a higher level of quality (we feel) in the applications we’ve produced.
Posted August 12th, 2010 by joshkahn
Hard to believe but we’re already planning for next year’s South by Southwest conference.
We’ve submitted a few proposals for panel presentations based on work that we have underway in the Best Buy Open API team that we think would be interesting and useful to the attendees.
The SXSW team is using their Panel Picker system to allow potential attendees of the conference to collectively choose the panels that sound the most compelling.
Here’s a brief description of the panel ideas we’ve submitted along with their panel picker links. If any look compelling to you, we’d appreciate a little voting love. Voting is closed as of August 27th.
Human API- The Evolution of Best Buy’s Twelpforce http://bit.ly/blicug
Challenges of SOA with a Legacy Brand (BestBuy) http://bit.ly/96S6S6
RDFa, Microdata, Microformats: Gateway Drugs to Semantic Web http://bit.ly/d5v6aO
Posted August 11th, 2010 by JohnB
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.
Posted August 6th, 2010 by JohnB
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.
Posted March 22nd, 2010 by JohnB
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.
Posted March 21st, 2010 by Cam Gross
Just days away from 2010 International CTIA. Velocity has never been higher in our build team.
Best Buy IdeaX is filling with constructive ideas from our employees and customers – ideas that are getting serious attention from around the organization. In addition, the platform we built with BustOut Solutions is now an open source project called BBYIDX.
Twelpforce is answering thousands of customer questions with more than 2500 active employee Twelpers. We’re building some more efficient ways for customers and employees to view and manage these interactions on BBYFeed (Beta). We have a mobile web version in development.
Both of Best Buy’s core mobile applications are also gaining some steam.
iPhone:
Version 3.1 finally went live in the last couple days. (The Apple Appstore review process took a little longer this time around.) This new version includes a new feed of offers that can change daily. It also solves some of the app closing issues.
The next version is almost ready for Apple approval. It is slated to include, improved store locator, some user interface (UI) improvements, bug fixes, graceful interruptions and <insert drum roll> IMPROVED SEARCH. We are very excited about that.
Posted March 2nd, 2010 by Cam Gross
We are very fortunate that the first users of the Best Buy Android app care enough to take the time to comment. It is motivating to us to get such instantaneous feedback- both positive and negative. For the users that make comments about what we should add or what expectations were missed, we can only hope that we can build fast enough.
We made a conscious choice to release our application with limited features. Doing so would allow us to get a functional application into the Market sooner and would provide users something tangible on which to comment. It was our hope that users would tell us which features were most important to them.
We get our comments and feedback on several fronts including:
- The Market- these are the comments that users make in the Market listing when they download the application. You can see these comments here.
- Best Buy IdeaX- we have a “Current” on IdeaX that is all about recommendations for our Android Application.
- This Blog – Your comments to our entries here are reviewed regularly
- Email – From within the application, we take comments via email to bbyandroid@gmail.com
Posted February 11th, 2010 by Cam Gross
Best Buy Android App Splash Screen
This week, our team published Best Buy’s first application for the Android platform. It is a beginning. We look at it as a work in progress. Can we call it “beta?”
Scan this with your Android phone to download app.
We have a lengthy list of features and user stories we are working to implement. For now, our first release includes: search, browse, add to cart, complete purchase (through Best Buy’s Mobile website), and the beginnings of some offer delivery on the home screen. Our process is one that encourages the release of a “work-in-progress” for users to try and provide feedback. It is this feedback that will guide the priorities in future releases.
Features at the top of our list include:
* MORE OFFERS!
* Store locator
* Improve search
* Add Reward Zone features
* More offers
After that, the pile of ideas we are working to develop is tall. They are just ideas. Ultimately, we are hoping to get guidance from users and their preferences to determine the features we should add next. If you have ideas, please feel free to email us (bbyandroid@gmail.com), comment here, or post your suggestions on IdeaX.
