Best Buy Apps

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

So far, the results have been better than we ever anticipated.  Twelpforce has been written up by a couple of influential bloggers, and the buzz on twitter is very visible.  Seems people really like the TV spots, and the service as well.  We’ve had some great wins out of the gate, and while we’re a long way from our utopia-state, we are learning every day.  Our associates are figuring out “what’s right/good” on their own (with a little coaching, sure), and in following the conversation threads, we believe we’re making a real impact in hundreds of 1:1 conversations.  This may sound weird, but we’ve purposely left out of our training any kind of “Here’s how it should look when you tweet” manual because authenticity is key, and we believe wisdom will come from actually “doing”, and from peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. The thing is, we will do this learning not in some back room training session, but live, and in real time.  So, we will we make some mistakes.  And they will be public mistakes.  But if the effort is genuine, and the voices are authentic, so I believe we’ll be given the benefit of the doubt.  No one anywhere is perfect, but we’re giving it an honest effort, and that should count for a lot in a day where it seems hard to get that.  We’re saying to people that the stake in the ground for Best Buy is to leverage our biggest asset, our store employees, to try and deliver a great experience in this channel.  We expected some glitches, and we’re actively coaching our employees on what good looks like. But they only become a problem if we fail to learn, and take action to correct them.

In the near future, some of the things we have planned to better the service include rolling out some technical tools/widgets to our associates that will make it easier to find questions so they don’t slip through the cracks.  We’ve also worked out some of the early bugs that prevented responses that were hashtagged with #twelpforce from appearing in the @twelpforce feed.  We’re also working on providing an assortment of twitter background pages so our assiciates can pick and choose which one they want to use to to represent themselves, or the store.  More importantly, we’re listening to what customers are telling us needs fixing, and are prepared to act on those comments.

Here’s some feedback we’ve received to date, and my POV:

“I don’t love the name”.  That’s OK, it’s grown on us, and give it time, maybe it will grow on you.

“There’s too much volume in the feed for me to follow Twelpforce”.  Ok, that tells me that we’ve got a lot to say, and this is a good spot to be in.  We’re not looking to have a million followers.  Seriously.  I think the most important number to look at is “responses” since each tweet = an engagement with a customer.  We want to be there when you need us, so I’m OK with ignoring the “followers” number.

“How come I got four responses to my question?”  We’re trying to arm customers with information.  I look at it like asking a room full of associates for their POV.  One answer may be best suited for your situation, so that answer may be the one you carry around as you consider making your purchase.  It doesn’t make the other three answers wrong, just not “as right” for you.

‘Why did you include the twitter address in the TV spots, aren’t there some people who don’t know what twitter is?”  Yes, there are, and our hope is that this effort speeds the adoption of this medium for those that haven’t taken the leap.  We’re giving up the ability to “track” traffic, and that’s OK, because this is not about simply getting in front of customers with an “impression”, it’s about relationships, and sharing what we know with the world.

Lastly….I wanted to say that I’m proud to work for a company that supports the idea that we can, and should, harness the power of our employees, and share our POV’s freely with those who solicit a question.  This initiative has the potential to play a part in helping change the perception of the way brands, the people that make them up, and customers create and maintain relationships, and I’m excited to be a part of it.

Follow John Bernier at twitter.com/bernierjohn