Like many companies, we strongly believe that the long term viability of our Brand relies solely upon the strength of our customer relationships. We know strong relationships will translate into customers wanting more from us – more stores, more categories, more trips. Customers wanting more, is how I know whether a brand is great much like the frenzy associated with the IPhone.
While we do pretty well in Consumer Electronics, we know that we have lots of opportunities to build better customer relationships. We have lots of ideas as to how to create stronger bonds. Some work, most fail but we are out there continually looking for better ways to serve customers
However, for any of this work to be effective, foundational in my view, is trust. If you don’t trust us, I don’t know how you can believe anything that we do or say. From my lens, trust begins with being transparent and genuine with what we do and say in the store all the way through the Corporate office. When we consistently act this way, then we will rewarded with your trust and then we can get on to building stronger relationships.
Now we come to the Reward Zone Black Card test in which we hit send on 6.8 million emails (vs the 1,000 we intended). This is a test on how to strengthen our customer relationships. However, we screwed up the execution which makes me feel sick about the customer trust that we have impacted. I was going to say “potentially impacted ” but it is pretty hard to see how we look good on this, I know because I tried this line out on my boss.
So we have been transparent and genuine, admitted our mistake, apologized for it, and you might be saying, “now what?.” For starters, I would like to have a better remedy for people than “I am sorry.” I just don’t have the easy answer and am thus very interested in hearing your ideas. In addition, Barb Olson, VP Loyalty, has done a video blog, (www.youtube.com/bestbuy), and is encouraging your input on what you would like to see in the Reward Zone program.
I feel like this dialogue is just a start. I encourage you to give me your POV on how we are dealing with this situation. I am learning fast and I thank those who are participating.
I think this mistake will be forgotten quite quickly. To me, most people shop at BBY for three different reasons:
1.) Proximity
2.) Price
3.) Knowledge (which is really hit or miss depending on which employee you get)
Getting an erroneous e-mail is not really an inconvenience and does not offset any of the above. Especially since the e-mail was sent to your most loyal customers…. after all, RZ members visit the stores more frequently, have a higher ASP, and are more likely to use the BBY Card than any other customer.
In your posts, you often mention building “customer relationships” as an avenue for long term profitability.
Something that can be quite effective at building customer relationships is taking a stronger conversational approach to marketing. I would love BBY to take the first step and develop a corp blog to help foster a sense of community.
Great post, and I look forward to reading more soon!
P.S. My RZ certificates always expire before I get a chance use them… perhaps that strategic ! ? !
Thanks, Barry. I’m a Rewards Zone customer who received your email. Those of us who are part of corporations realize they’re just collections of humans. With humans come human error. Kudos for addressing the FU this way. Glad corporate counsel is not standing in your way.
Well, I was excited to think I was “elite” but I didn’t know why. I do spend plenty of my fun money at Best Buy, but not enough to get in the silver program I guess. I was disappointed to hear it was a mistake. But how can you make it up to 6.8 million people? I think most people understand mistakes can happen. Apologizing and explaining goes a long way. Should I expect something, anything, to make up for the mistake? No, I think the explanation was enough for me.
If I could suggest anything regarding the RZ program, perhaps rewarding members for the length of time they have been active members, besides just focusing on how much they spend. $100 for one person could me a much bigger percentage of their income then another, but the Silver and Black programs seem to reward the people that make the most money – and they probably need the rewards the least.
Hello Barry,
Thanks for the post. It’s great to see you on Twitter, as well.
I once had a similar thing happen to me and there’s just no escape from the suckdom of it. The idea of tiered service levels with Best Buy Reward Zone is a great one… don’t let this get you down.
I hope you find the Best Buy customers are mostly forgiving. Mistakes happen. In my situation, for the REALLY angry people, I attempted to placate people with schwag. In your case, I’d use bonus reward points. Other customers forgave us in time.
With regard to what customers want, I think setting up a customer listening and co-creation site is a great idea. MyStarbucksIdea.com is one example, although I think there’s huge room for improvement on what Starbucks is doing.
Best Buy’s customer co-creation site should be more collaborative, feature a better UI, have a bit more structured data and tagging. It should als obe made more usable, more searchable and employ voting methods that are more relevant and meaningful. To build relationship with your more vocal users, you can assign Best Buy experience advocates to converse with active users and communicate results outwardly. These individuals can have ties into social media channels as appropriate.
The message of the site would be “Best Buy Listens.” Beyond encouraging customer engagement through idea provision, you can use the site to survey store purchasers and allow users to rank their local stores while they’re giving you feedback. This will not only give you an extra dimension of insight into local store performance, capturing localized customer data gives you the later ability to communicate to these vocal users to invite them to invitation only purchasing events, store seminars and more. Further, you can tie the comment mechanisms into your email system, so that store management will instantly receive input from customers and have the ability to contact them, as necessary.
To help run analytics on the feedback provided you can use your BI and Clarabridge tools to mine the information and identify trends in expressed customer needs/wants/complaints/praise.
Can I help you build this!?
Great blog entry. I like the way Best Buy is fessing up to the mistake publicly. It shows a lot of guts and awareness.
As I see it, this is a great opportunity for Best Buy. Oddly, it is a unique and potentially powerful way to get word out about the program’s changes.
The response can either be simply apologetic “we screwed up, we’re sorry, we shouldn’t have done it.” That allows you to save some face and potentially let the issue pass.
Or, the response can be magnanimous “we screwed up, but everybody is going to gain from it.” That allows you to look like you have an inordinate amount of care for your customers, and that you are different.
Although potentially more expensive in the short term, I like the latter. And it doesn’t have to be a huge deal or extremely costly:
• Bump everyone’s status up for 6 months to the next higher tier
• Give everyone 1 month of black tier for a month
• Give everyone some extra RZ points, and tell them that you hope they get to be a black tier member soon
• Have people who got the letter go into a BBY store with it and their RZ card, and when they track down a Blue Shirt, he/she can give them an on the spot discount or double/triple/quadruple RZ points for their purchase that day
My take is that giving even a little bit will go a long way.
I also don’t think you should wait too long to give a response. If you move swiftly and generously, that will offer a lot of good will.
After contributing to and seeing subsequent conversations on this via Twitter, including your own comments and queries for feedback, it seems the influence of that kind of immediate feedback to the situation would be worth noting.
The sheer volume of people touched makes it a potentially big issue but at it’s core, an honest mistake. BB quick email replies to the original 1000 plus the other millions says a lot. But as you’ve said, it’s just a start.
Somehow comping 6.8 million people somehow, even in a very small way, simply isn’t practical. Soliciting their feedback and recognizing those that do costs next to nothing and could go a very, very long way.
As you’ve been successful with BlueShirt Nation internally, I’d be curious to hear your plans on evolving the RZ program into a customer social community.
Not only would it offer a destination for exposure to Best Buy information and idea sharing between customers, it would also provide an incredibly useful “on-demand” focus group or community for testing and feedback on products and marketing efforts.
[...] acknowledgement, and engagement. He recognized the impact this would have on loyalty. Last night, he blogged about the incident, as well as their expected approaches. This level of transparency is practically a blueprint for [...]
LOVE the blog and the conversation. Great question “what should we do beside say we’re sorry?”
To me, the core issue is that this is about relationships and that’s the metaphor for gauging the response. In real life, sometimes saying “oops” seems to be enough, sometimes its not and its up to someone’s gut to give them some guidance.
For this instance, feels like having your spouse see a gift you got for someone else and mistakenly think its for them. Sorry is helpful but probably not enough. You got people’s hopes up and then basically ‘dissed” them by saying ah, actually you’re not that special and the gift isn’t for you. Feels bad no matter how you spin it, even if it was just a little gift.
If this happened to me at home, I’d buy my wife a little something a couple days later and tell her how much she meant to me, feels like you should treat customers the same. This was an honest mistake and people understand mistakes so no need to go overboard. A $5 bonus cert AND an assurance from BBY that they truly value ALL their customers and hope they visit soon so BBY can have a chance to do right by them and continue to earn their trust- that would take the sting away a little if I just found out I wasn’t really invited to the party.
In the grand scheme of things, its the thought that counts. If people use the cert, great. They feel good and BBY gets a store visit. if they don’t, many will probably appreciate and potentially remember the gesture. They probably won’t remember anything about the “we’re sorry” note except that they were dissapointed.
Hi Barry,
following your request to expand on my employment brand=consumer brand. Hope this is an ok spot for it. In a way it relates to your post above.
This topic is worthy of a conversation but I’ll do my best to represent my point(s) here.
1. Everyone we interact with as candidates for our jobs (whether hired or not) has an image of Best Buy in their mind.
2. The ‘candidate experience’ we provide them impacts their impressions of us overall. I know people who were pissed about their candidate experience and subsequently bought their plasma tv at Circuit City.
3. Currently we have separate budgets, resources, and headcount for communicating the consumer brand and the employment brand and little connection between the two parties unless initiated by an individual.
4. A job opportunity is not so different than a product. Except that its more personal, emotional, and therefore potentially more powerful for swaying buying decisions and evangelism or anti-evangelism.
5. There are a lot of eyeballs that come through the career site. Eyeballs looking for a closer connection to our company, brand, and culture.
6. We’re pretty good at treating our internal people well, but how about our potential internal people?
7. Do that well, and distinctly and you’ll never have to pay an agency fee, job board posting again, or referral fee, again. (see Google, Industrial Light and Magic)
I have many more points, but I’m sure you get it as does Crispin. (so glad we’re with them) ask them about the Google Billboard for recruiting.
The gist is we have pitifully light resources for employment branding, when that, done well, I predict would have a huge impact on your bottom line and street cred and smooth the bumps in the coming “War for Talent” that people like to talk about.
I have lots of ideas for how to do this if you’re interested. Some I’m working on right now, others we haven’t started yet.
Cheers,
Josh
PS – Kudos on blogging, honesty and transparency.
I like your thought a lot. In fact, saw some advertising from Crispin yesterday that was aimed at potential employees but had the additional benefit of being able to be viewed by consumers. Kind of like we were looking for people to audition for jobs which had the benefit of enaling consumers to say “That is pretty cool, that Best Buy is looking for people who do that.” Their thought is that we need to ensure that working at Best Buy is cool and perceived to be cool as well. In a word, make the Blue Shirt the modern day Barista. I think the idea is strong.
So, yes, I see your point and agree with it. And the idea of using our advertising as a means to connect with employees and consumers is a good one that I hope we make some progress on this year.
re: email snafu – Customers are very forgiving. Use this as an opportunity to open a dialogue with them & build community around the loyalty program. I agree with Lee & others to use it to gather feedback. Did it create the opening to do a survey? It’s always good to ask what the community wants.
Cool. I’m a big fan of Crispin. Never spoken with anyone there, but have spoken with Robert Stephens about them, and read up on them. They get it.
Thanks for the response. If it’s cool with you I may drop a comment or two here to update you periodically with what we’re doing as far as new creative ways to engage potential talent. So often it seems recruiting works in a vacuum and the rest of the enterprise is unaware of what we’re doing, when some things we’re working on have potential impact to the brand.
Thanks also for the response.
Cheers,
Josh
I would appreciate that. In fact, as we move forward with landing our Brand message, I see recruitment advertising as part of our advertising mix. On Friday, Crispin gave us some new creative concepts and employee advertising was one of the big ideas.
Re email snafu
I think a survey to those consumers who got the email asking how the program could be improved is a great idea. I think we will go ahead with that idea.
Hi Barry,
As part of a small company, I understand the opportunities and challenges that lie in customer relations. On your email issue:
- every obstacle is an opportunity. For one, most people won’t read the email. If you guys did your job well, you can see how many people actually opened it (which I’m guessing is in the 10% tops). The good thing is: you got their attention. Why not use it for a special promotion? Hi, we made a mistake. But we value your business, so we’re offering XXX. Refer a friend and you get XX and they get XX. A “redemption” redemption code if you will.
- take corrective measures. There seems to be a problem with the sanity check process for emailing. Add a barrier before anyone can hit the “click” button (like special authorization codes from managers for emails sent to over 1 million users?)
On a side note…. I’ve had other bad CS experience with BB myself…
I went to Best Buy to buy a DDR combo pad + video game. But since it was my very first purchase after I bought the Xbox 360, I didn’t know that if you open a game – any game – including combos with hardware, if you open it, that’s it. No returns. The salesperson I talked to in the isle about the DDR didn’t know the songs that were included, and didn’t tell me about the return policy. The cashier didn’t tell me about the return policy.
I’m not trying to simply state a CS issue like millions of others you have daily: I’m saying that trust comes up front as well as after the fact. $90 out of my pocket later, Best Buy has lost my trust forever (I resold the combo at a loss on Craigslist because I really DID NOT want it). And unfortunately for you, the competition with other brick and mortar as well as with etailers is fierce.
Good luck!
Caroline
[...] Silver customers and the social media conversation was very positive. A further example, the day RewardZone Black was accidentally emailed to millions of people, Barry Judge our CMO noticed the increased conversation on the ’spy’ in his office and [...]