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]