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
