Best Buy Apps

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.

In my opinion, it’s not business as usual anymore…the global marketplace is clearly shrinking, and customers are empowered with tools that let them walk side by side with manufacturers or retailers to tell them exactly what they think of their product or service. If companies don’t trust their employees enough to empower them (right now) to Listen, Learn, Interact, and ultimately Change their behaviors/products/procedures, I believe those companies will have a short lived future. They will be destined to be replaced by a company that has learned to leverage this unique opportunity to listen to the customer to provide them more of what they need, when they need it, where they want it.

Is Twelpforce the be-all, end-all, certainly not, but it is giving us a good ear to the ground to hear exactly what our customers need with regard to truly enabling the “experience” everyone wants when they buy a product, and that’s a good thing…all we can do is to continue to learn, adapt and evolve our approach as the future unfolds.