Posts Tagged ‘Best Buy’
Saturday Morning Reads: Servicing the Customer
This is a marketing blog, so why am I reading and sharing customer service articles? Well, because as with all things time and learning leads to change.
And one major change that needs to happen is for us marketing, public relations and communications professionals to pause for a moment to learn from our friends in customer service.
Our customers don’t silo their experiences with us; they never have and never will. Any outreach or interation is from the brand, not from the silo. From that perspective isn’t there value in understanding how servicing the customer at any point of communication or interaction provides an experience that benefits the organization overall all?
As we know, great customer service never goes out of style and below are insights into how companies like Southwest Air, Best Buy and Publix have made a business decision to put the customer in the center of their organization in order to service them better.
1. Retail’s Big Blog: Southwest co-founder shares how to show employees the LUV
“We don’t have any secrets; we are an open book. But every time these companies came in they would want to know ‘what are your programs?’ And I would say over and over—and you could see the shades go down because people didn’t buy it—we don’t have ‘programs’ it’s a way of life. It is who we are. We spend an incredible amount of time hiring the right people who want to do the right thing. But we don’t have programs for handling things.”
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Tags: Best Buy, Customer Service, Customer-Centric, Experiential Products, Publix, Southwest Air | 
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In Search of Integrated Marketing Genius
Yeah, you. You’re the genius I am referring to!
In all the years of blogging here at The Harte of Marketing, I haven’t really asked for much, but I need your help.
I am looking for examples, case studies (I dread using that term, trust me), or even bread crumb trails that might lead me in the right direction. I’ve been digging around for examples of smart integrated marketing and customer-centric organizations to shine a spotlight on here at The Harte of Marketing.
While exploring the depths of the interwebs (my friend Tish Grier says it’s akin to spelunking), I have found some great articles, examples, interviews, but I know there is more to uncover. I am looking for examples where companies have…
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Social Media in Action
A few weeks ago I went to Best Buy to get a new laptop and software. I asked for what I wanted and left with my new laptop fully loaded with software. It wasn’t until I got home that I noticed the Microsoft Office version and Internet protection software loaded wasn’t what I had asked for. So, the following week (when I had time), I went back and explained that they had provided and installed the wrong version of Microsoft Office (it was a non-commercial use version). They told me an upgrade would solve the problem.
Today, I finally had a chance to load the upgrade and well, you guessed it, it was still a non-commercial use version and not what I wanted at all.
I packed up the laptop and all the software boxes and trekked back over to Best Buy. This would be my third trip and last time I was there I got a bit of resistance (they didn’t want to deal with returning opened and used software). So this time around, I thought I should see if Best Buy customer service was on Twitter.
A bunch of folks on Twitter let me know that the CMO of Best Buy, Barry Judge (@BestBuyCMO) was on Twitter (thank you @LenKendall, @DMASocialMedia, @KeithBurtis, @PhilBaumann for letting me know). I tweeted the CMO of Twitter and got a response from Gina, Best Buy’s Community Manager (@gina_community). Gina sent me an e-mail address and asked me to let her know what was going on at the store. I sent her an e-mail from my BlackBerry to get her up-to-date.
In the meantime, the Product Manager (Dwayne) at Best Buy was working with me to figure out what the next steps were. Simultaneously I was interacting with Gina on-line and Dwayne offline. Gina also e-mailed the store to see what progress was being made.
Dwayne was great and I was able to return all of the software that I couldn’t use and I finally got what I needed.
I was really glad to see that Best Buy was listening on Twitter, but unfortunately, they paid the price for not listening off-line (they are now stuck with a bunch of software that they can’t re-sell).
By the way, this whole situation was resolved in about 10-15 minutes and I can finally give kudos to Best Buy. I guess it’s true what they say… “third time’s a charm.”
[Image: San Fransisco Chronicle, SFGate.com]
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The Harte of Marketing by Beth Harte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.theharteofmarketing.com. [If you have a question about what you can use from this blog, click on the above Creative Commons link to learn more.]
