Best Buy Doesn’t Get Twitter.. Even Though They Think They Do.

November 29, 2009 by admin 

The New York Times ran an article on Best Buy’s new Twitter strategy the other day, talking about how the company is embracing customer engagement after ignoring us for so long.  Unfortunately they still don’t get it.

Let me start by saying that I have never been a fan of Best Buy. Whether it was their practice of not honoring their own website pricing or how they swindle unassuming people with ridiculously overpriced cables, they’ve never been very reputable in my book.  Nevertheless I am a customer.   They beat me up and I keep coming back. So I guess it’s partly my fault.  But I have continued shopping there mainly because I like their in-store pickup service.  It’s convenient and nice to know the inventory is reserved before I make the 20-30 minute trek up to the nearest Best Buy retail store.

For a few months now Melissa and I were thinking about picking up a new television for downstairs. This weekend Best Buy had a great price on a mid-range TV that was even showing up in stock at the store closest to us.  I happily ordered it and was all set to run up there this afternoon and avoid the hassle of delivery appointments and logistics. But unfortunately I was notified this morning that the unit was out of stock at my store and that I should call customer service.

Screen shot 2009-11-29 at 2.26.48 PM

Screenshot from Best Buy's customer service page

No problem.   Another nearby store had stock, so I was planning to have them re-direct the order there.   After all, their website says customer service is “staffed up and ready to assist” so it shouldn’t take long.  Right?  Wrong.

After sitting on hold for over ten minutes, I decided I wasn’t going to waste time on this holiday weekend begging Best Buy to take my money.  So Twitter to the rescue.   I shoot off a Tweet to @twelpforce – the Best Buy presence in the Twitterverse – right before I got disconnected from the customer service center:

LonSeidman: @twelpforce Annoyed. why no cancel button for in-store pickup orders that end up not in stock?  Twenty minute hold time is unacceptable

And a few minutes later I get a reply from a member of their Twitter team:

ApplExpert50: @lonseidman #twelpforce An in-store pickup may be canceled at anytime by calling 1-888-BESTBUY. Sorry for the hold time. ‘Tis the holidays!

Huh?  Did I not already do that and complain about the fact I couldn’t get through to anyone?  But it gets better, as this message came over ten seconds later:

ApplExpert50: @lonseidman #twelpforce If you’d like to see a different process for canceling orders adopted, suggest it at our IdeaX:   http://is.gd/56Y8u

Yeah thanks.  Submit your idea to our customer suggestion box black hole.   Like that’s going to solve my problem.  But Best Buy isn’t done yet.  Their official Twelpforce account retweets the exchange to give the impression that they’re actually helping me. I’m livid, especially given that I was hung up on twice in the intervening minutes.  So I then tweet:

LonSeidman: @ApplExpert50 Forget it, third time I got hung up on.  The order will sit.  If it charges my card you can work it out with American Express.

And that’s what finally prompts the response I was hoping for all along:

ApplExpert50: @lonseidman #twelpforce I apologize for the poor phone experience. Email details and Ord # to twelpforce@bestbuy.com so we can look into it.

See what’s wrong with this picture?  If a customer is upset enough that they’re tweeting about it, why not have a process in place to help keep the business?   I surely don’t expect the website to get re-engineered in ten minutes, but finding a solution to a customer problem should have been their first instinct.  If they’re paying people to monitor Twitter why not empower them to solve problems?

Comcast, believe it or not, is the shining light in the Twitterverse.  They have a very active presence that combs through millions of tweets a day looking for those having issues with their services. When there is a problem, they respond immediately and begin offering customers options to get things fixed.  What’s more, they direct those company resources to the customer as opposed to asking the customer to make phone calls.  In my experience they solve service issues faster on Twitter than they do over the phone.  Very impressive.

The lesson?  Just being on Twitter isn’t enough.  Business in the 21st century is about engagement and fixing problems, and doing whatever it takes to keep the business.  Small businesses have known this forever: an angry customer in a small community can easily escalate into a bad reputation.  Big business knows that now even the smallest customer might have 75 Facebook friends.  I have nearly 1,300 who will be reading this shortly.

This blog post would have been considerably different had somebody worked to solve the problem.  Instead Amazon got the business.

UPDATE:  Apparently the head of social media at Best Buy  finds the above post insulting.  Can these guys be any more out of touch?

UPDATE:  I received an email from a ‘twelpforce’ representative today.  This confirms my assertation that “Twelpforce” really is not a vehicle for customer service but more for driving sales.  Here’s an excerpt:

..in general Twelpforce is meant to resolve product inquiries. In reality, most of our Twelpforce representatives are sales associates who are working in stores, or departments that may not have access to the proper systems to assist with changing your BestBuy.com order. In this case, the options they have is to either direct you to call in or email us directly.

Comcast resolves issues directly through Twitter, directing company resources to help the customer get the problem resolved.  Best Buy clearly doesn’t, and will continue to funnel customers into overloaded customer service centers.

What they need is to have a staff of “twelpers” who are equipped to solve these customer issues.  In the meantime I took my business elsewhere.

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Comments

  • BestBuyPaducah
    Well, no, Twelpforce is a customer service tool, in that it exists mainly to answer questions, which most of them are either questions about "Which X is good for Y?" or "How do I make my X do Y?" You're correct in that many of the Twelpers are not equipped to handle customer order issues, for a couple of reasons. One, many of the Twelpers do this from home when they can get a few minutes to help out and thus are away from any sort of lookup tool. Two, many of them are not managers and thus not allowed to make that call themselves. We direct a lot of issues like the one you had to twelpforce@bestbuy.com because it's read by people at the corporate level who can modify orders, issue gift cards, and basically provide that next level of customer service you're looking for.

    I can't make any excuses for the phone system, it's been a mess since Black Friday and they're hammering it out as quick as they can.

    I agree with the spirit of your post, that the Twelpers need to be more empowered to handle the issues directly. However part of the foundation of Twelpforce was that it's the collective wisdom of the employees working to answer questions. It's still a very young project, you keep an eye on the industry so you know that the ideas become more useful as they mature. I don't expect to see everyone on Twelpforce able to cancel orders and give out gift cards, but I do think we could see some sort of compromise in the future. In the meantime, @Coral_BestBuy is our community manager and handles issues exactly like this, primarily through the aformentioned twelpforce@bestbuy.com account.

    It sounds bad but it takes problems like these to learn the weaknesses in our system, and figure out where and how to improve. I hope you don't swear us off because of one bad experience in the midst of the holiday season, and I know if you shoot an email to the twelpforce address they're going to do whatever they can to keep you as a customer.

    I'll be keeping an eye on this page for a reply, tell me what stuck out as the strangest or worst part of the ordeal and how you feel it should have gone, or should have been improved.

    Thanks for the post, we can only improve via feedback and hopefully we can impress you yet.

    Daniel
    @BestBuyPaducah
  • Thanks for your response. Here's what I think along with a suggestion:

    Answering questions may be customer service as far as Best Buy is concerned, but from what I've seen it's more marketing driven.

    Customer service is just that -- fixing customer issues quickly in order to keep the business. Let's face it, you guys are in a commodity business where price rules over loyalty. And in this case your inability to resolve a simple problem quickly resulted in lost business.

    So here's my suggestion: Twelpforce is a much more efficient way to resolve customer problems than a call center. Clearly you need to maintain a call center, but for those savvy enough to contact you through Twitter and other means you can gain a ton of goodwill by being able to very quickly address specific order issues electronically. I'd much prefer to send an email knowing my issue will be resolved within 1-3 hours than sit on the phone for half a day.

    So here's what I would do if I was in charge:

    1. Have a staff of Twelpforce members who have access to the order system and can work to resolve customer issues quickly. Note: the 1 - 3 day response time you're currently promising customers is unacceptable. It needs to be 1 - 3 hours seven days a week.

    2. For the marketing based staff that are volunteering, they need to have a channel to direct inquiries like mine to the right person. Suggesting they repeat the process that's already failing them like @ApplExpert50 did will only piss us off more.

    The bottom line? Your staff should not require the customer to do anything more after the initial complaint. Ingest the issue into your customer service system, find the root of the problem, and solve it.

    Here's how my inquiry should have gone:

    1. Me: @twelpforce Annoyed. why no cancel button for in-store pickup orders that end up not in stock? Twenty minute hold time is unacceptable

    2. You: @lonseidman sorry to hear you are having trouble. We can help cancel or redirect your order if you email the order number to twelpforce@bestbuy.com. We'll get on it right away.

    That's all you needed to do and the TV that just arrived would have come from you and not Amazon.com.
  • BestBuyPaducah
    Some good ideas in here, let me go over this.

    "Customer service is just that -- fixing customer issues quickly in order to keep the business. Let's face it, you guys are in a commodity business where price rules over loyalty. And in this case your inability to resolve a simple problem quickly resulted in lost business."

    I agree wholeheartedly with this, and I realize it for what it is, if we'd executed better I'm sure the order would have stayed with us.

    "1. Have a staff of Twelpforce members who have access to the order system and can work to resolve customer issues quickly. Note: the 1 - 3 day response time you're currently promising customers is unacceptable. It needs to be 1 - 3 hours seven days a week."

    This seems reasonable, I believe part of the problem is at the moment we're still doing a lot of analytics to determine just how many people are going to be needed to staff that mailbox. We're going through some growing pains while the corporate manpower lags behind the demand for quicker response times. I can't promise it's going to be better next week, or even next month, but the company's committed to Twelpforce and if we can improve something as simple as quicker email responses it will happen.

    "2. For the marketing based staff that are volunteering, they need to have a channel to direct inquiries like mine to the right person. Suggesting they repeat the process that's already failing them like @ApplExpert50 did will only piss us off more."

    Now, this is an issue that's being worked on presently, and that's the training of Twelpers to do exactly this, send issues to the proper channels. Myself, John Bernier and several other senior members are hammering out a sort of mentoring/training system, so new users can learn the right and wrong way to handle these issues. Right now there are three channels, calling the store the order originated from (the one who would provide the pick-up item in this instance), calling 800-BestBuy, and emailing twelpforce@bestbuy.com in the event that the first two don't get it right. If you ever watch the #twelpforce stream, you'll see that the latter's being used more and more while skipping the first two, which is what's causing the backlog. Getting these issues to the proper place is fundamental, and something that is an area we can improve on.

    "The bottom line? Your staff should not require the customer to do anything more after the initial complaint. Ingest the issue into your customer service system, find the root of the problem, and solve it."

    There's perhaps a more underlying issue, not a problem but more of a quirk. Twelpforce, when first put on the table, wasn't conceived as an alternative to the customer care number. Like I said in the first post, the idea was to field questions like "Which X is good for Y?" or "How do I make my X do Y?", and maybe some basic answers on return policies and whatnot. The real customer service side of it was an unplanned extension of our presence on Twitter, but has become an excellent opportunity to have another chance at keeping a customer. It hasn't gone ignored, and there are a lot of changes and additions being discussed and developed. Maybe we'll see a separate account for order issues (this is conjecture, not inside info), or an employee-accessible site to pull up order information. We do have the ability to grow, and to avoid issues like this in the future. I just hope you'll bear with us until we hit that point.

    I hope you enjoy the TV you ended up with, and that you'll keep us in mind in the future. Send me a tweet or a DM if I can do anything or pass any feedback or suggestions on.

    Merry Christmas,
    Daniel
    @BestBuyPaducah
  • mawaru
    Ouch, its sad that you have to get angry and jump through hoops when you want to spend money to enjoy yourself. Well, since Amazon is better for you, go with Amazon next time. I've been pretty much buying through Amazon and if anything is out of stock, I'll just add it to watchmyitems.com and wait for Amazon to restock. No making my blood boil.
  • You Said: "Reading through the tweets on the twitter site, and not the select ones you chose to help drive home your point, it looks like the Twelpforce did help solve your problem. You never expressly stated you were dealing with our 1-888 number. They may have assumed that you were dealing with the store directly and getting cut off. Looks to me like once that was made clear, they helped you by giving your contact info necessary to fix your situation."

    I was given contact information that did absolutely nothing. The 888 number was the source of my woes to begin with, and four hours later I've heard nothing back from the email address I sent my info to, only being told that it may take up to two days to get a response.

    This sale could have been wrapped up this afternoon yet your organization's inability to decentralize your customer service department resulted in a critical blog post and lost business.

    Unfortunately Best Buy hasn't empowered the Twelpers to make those changes, and instead forces customers through telephone support that's completely inadequate. Just think how less strained your customer service department would be if all of these people you have monitoring Twitter could actually do something to help disaffected customers.

    Good customer service means assuming nothing. Ask the questions like "how can we resolve this problem?" and then work to fix it. Instead nothing happened and nobody has contacted me other than to say I'm insulting people.

    And in full disclosure here's every Tweet I sent today in regards to the issue, newest to oldest. Yes I was annoyed but mainly because I was being told to follow a path that already led nowhere:

    @TWELPFORCE SERIOUSLY? Don't you think I've already tried that? Been hung on three times. Forget it. Ordered on Amazon.

    @ApplExpert50 Forget it, third time I got hung up on. The order will sit. If it charges my card you can work it out with American Express.

    @ApplExpert50 You can learn from Comcast by actually FIXING problems, not suggesting the path that failed in the first place.

    @ApplExpert50 You guys totally suck. Already called, got hung up on twice. This is convenient? No thanks.

    @twelpforce and now I just spent ten minutes on hold just to be hung up on! Don't know what I was thinking, never had a good Best Buy exp.

    @twelpforce Annoyed. why no cancel button for in-store pickup orders that end up not in stock? Twenty minute hold time is unacceptable
  • Nice blog post. Sorry 'bout the issues you had today.


    A couple of comments:

    "I surely don’t expect the website to get re-engineered in ten minutes, but finding a solution to a customer problem should have been their first instinct."

    Reading through the tweets on the twitter site, and not the select ones you chose to help drive home your point, it looks like the Twelpforce did help solve your problem. You never expressly stated you were dealing with our 1-888 number. They may have assumed that you were dealing with the store directly and getting cut off. Looks to me like once that was made clear, they helped you by giving your contact info necessary to fix your situation.



    "If they’re paying people to monitor Twitter why not empower them to solve problems?"

    The majority of the members of the Twelpforce are NOT paid at all for their services. In fact, the only time we get paid to Twelp is if we do it from work. Since this would not allow us to interact with customers who came into our stores (and with this being the holidays the stores are getting very busy), most of our members Twelp from home, on their breaks, and in their free time. Because of this, they do not have access to the Best Buy systems in order to do things like cancel orders.


    So again, sorry for your experience with the 1-888 line today. Please don't let that reflect on the Best Buy stores and Twelpforce in a negative light.
  • Steveoh
    Fellow Twelper,

    The problem is that Twelpforce is purely a function of marketing. To be serious and helpful to customers, Twelpforce needs to be a fully functioning arm of customer service, staffed by paid customer service reps.

    You need to handle Lon's tweets as a legitimate customer service issue. Instead you simply perceive them as negative publicity that needs to be controlled.

    You need to step up your game.
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