#245 2009 · Best Buy · Retail / consumer electronicslegibility
Best Buy answered tech questions from anyone, about any brand, and let strangers watch
the problem
Traditional customer support is private by default — a call center conversation happens between one customer and one agent, invisible to everyone else who has the exact same question, so the same answer gets produced from scratch over and over at full cost every single time
background
A conventional support call center resolves one customer's issue at a time, in a channel nobody else can see, meaning the labor cost of answering a question is paid in full every time that same question comes up again from a different customer. It also typically restricts scope to the retailer's own products, refusing to help with a competitor's device or a general tech question, which narrows the value customers get from asking and gives them no reason to associate the brand with expertise beyond its own catalog.
Best Buy launched Twelpforce in July 2009: a single shared Twitter handle behind which any of its employees — eventually more than 2,500 of them — could answer technology questions in public, from any customer, about any brand, not just Best Buy's own products. Every answer was visible to everyone, not just the person who asked.
the move
By making support conversations public and open to any tech question rather than gated to Best Buy's own product catalog, each answer became a durable, searchable, indexable asset that could resolve the same question for every future person who searched it — converting a cost center that produced value once per interaction into content that kept producing value indefinitely, while demonstrating expertise broader than the company's own inventory.
the payoff
Within its first months, Twelpforce grew from roughly 400 to more than 2,500 participating employees, collectively answering tens of thousands of questions (documented at over 28,000 in later tallies) with an average response time under 12 minutes, and Best Buy reported a roughly 20% drop in customer complaints attributed to the program's responsiveness.
what came after
Twelpforce won the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes Lions in 2010, one of only two awarded that year, and is a standard case study in social-customer-service and marketing literature for converting a private cost center (support) into public, brand-building content simply by changing where the conversation happened, not what was said.
references
- [1]TechCrunch — Best Buy Goes All Twitter Crazy With @TwelpforceTechCrunch, 2009techcrunch.com
- [2]Ad Age — What Best Buy Learned About Service as Marketing and Empowering EmployeesAd Age, 2010adage.com