Great News!

My team I were honored by receiving Best Buy's Chairman Innovation Award, Honorable Mention.  This is Best Buy highest accolade and I am pleased and delighted to have received it.  I would like to thank my team for helping make this possible.  Through their tireless efforts, we have been able to expand the Best Buy brand in the blogosphere in ways unlike any other company.  This award gives our team and the entire Consumer Relations department great exposure within the company, showcasing the valuable work we do every day to support our customers. 

Our Journey

When I started two years ago combing the Internet on behalf of Best Buy in search of customers crying out for help, I did so not as an alternative to our other contact channels, but rather as a supplement.  My initial strategy was to locate situations that involved either a customer service issue or a technical issue and included the customer's contact information.  I would then contact the customer privately, resolve their situation and hope they would update their online posting.  While I was able to resolve several customer issues, customers did not update their initial online posting.  Therefore, the online public never knew the ending to the story.

So I shifted my strategy shifted to not only help Best Buy customers, but also show the online public that Best Buy is a concerned and connected retailer who wants to have a relationship with our customers.  I began by publicly and transparently responding to customers on behalf of the company.  I reached out and offered to investigate the situation they posted online.  This quickly resulted in both an online and offline dialogue with customers.  When issues were resolved, customers updated their followers with the resolution we had worked together to achieve.

I expanded my efforts to helping customers on Twitter in April 2008, and we launched this Community Forum in September 2008.  I now have a dedicated team who helps resolve customer service issues and technical support questions for our customers publicly on our Community Forum and Twitter as well as customers' personal blogs.  Our goal is to support customers using the medium they are most comfortable using to communicate with us - although, I remember some time ago, a customer mailed their issue to our corporate office on a 2'x4' poster.  We did our best to resolve this customer's issue; however, we did not mail back our response in the same manner!

Growth of Social Media

As more companies start using social media to support customers, I have seen some concerns  regarding the level of support customers receive using this online channel to broadcast an issue versus a traditional contact such as phone, email or letter.  It is not necessarily a difference in the level of tools or authority a traditional contact agent has; rather it is the difference in the number of voices that are invited to the conversation.

A traditional contact is a closed, two-way communication.  Forums, blogs, Twitter, etc. open the conversation to a larger audience allowing anyone to participate.  No single employee for a company has all the answers.  By opening up the dialogue to both employees and the online public, customers gain access to both a company's expertise and the online public's knowledge.  Our Community Forum is an excellent example of the mixture of Best Buy BlueShirt and Geek Squad Agent skills blending with the online public's knowledge.  The Community Forum is a platform that facilitates conversations between employees and customers.  It is a highly engaged community with the majority of the conversation generated by the community members.

TwelpForce, Best Buy's newest social media engagement, continues to facilitate the opening of access to the knowledge of our Best Buy BlueShirts and Geek Squad Agents.  Technology is by nature complex.  It is implausible to assume every time one of our customers has a technology question, they will drive to one of our stores.  Twitter and our Community Forum allow Best Buy to be with customers on their technology journey as a trusted adviser, there to help support making their technology dreams materialize as the need arises.  Social media tools enable a more connected relationship with companies and customers. 

The Future

Many customers are still turning to traditional means to contact companies.  I would postulate that none of the mainstream, commercially used social media tools convey as much as a telephone conversation or store visit.  Someday in the future, video conferencing may eclipse the telephone conversations.  My team and I will now strive to be pioneers in the use of video support for customers.  We will do so with the same careful, measured diligence that has made us successful in the blogosphere. 

The dawn of a new era in customer service is looming.  The future comprises advanced technology that allows for the rapid and immediate connection of customers with both a company's employees, its customers and the online public.  It is a bold step for a company to grasp this concept: to grow we must acknowledge we are a facilitator and an aggregator, not a beacon or panacea.  While there are solutions Best Buy can provide, it is the facilitation of conversation from a multitude of sources and its aggregation into easily accessible locations that will continue to ensure that Best Buy is a leader in the field of consumer electronics and social media.

Community user interface upgrade

You may have noticed some changes to our Community Forum.  Last night our forum platform was upgraded to a new user interface.  Here are some of the changes:

• New layout for user profiles. Now has the user's recent posts featured conveniently at the top.
• New terms used around the site. For example, topics replace threads and avatar instead of icon.
• Removal of the user dashboard.
• Users now have the option to change their date style to relative. This friendly format is "about an hour ago" which is cleaner than the standard "7/17/2009".
• Kudos is now built into the small user info at the left of a post. You now give post's kudos by clicking the star under the user's avatar. To the immediate left of the star is the posts total kudos.
• With the cleaner post design, more posts are viewable at once. This allows for quicker reading through a topic.
• Search has been completely overhauled. There is now just one search with a drop down for the scope of your search. From the home page your choices are for a community or user search. While looking at a board or topic the search options are for community, category, topic or user.
• The introduction of confirmation and feedback messages for selected actions.
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We hope you find the changes pleasant as having the new interface will allow for more functionality with our community in the future.

We're thinking about a new name for the Community Forums

We think it is time to ignite the community conversation for ideas on a new name.  Currently, our official name is "Best Buy® Community Forums."  We have been itching to come up with a new name for a while now.  We really would like some input from our community.  Have any ideas on a new name?

We're dabbling with the name "Technology Unboxed."  What do you think?  We could have the icons for boards be open boxes.  Thoughts?

We're still learning

We also want to point out that we are still growing and learning.  Although, we're rapidly approaching our one year with the forums, it is still new to us.  We're open to your feedback.  In fact, we encourage it.  This is a community after all.