Article

Hands-on review: Best Buy's Twelpforce

The electronics retailer is using Twitter to connect customers to an army of tech experts. How well does it work?

August 18, 2009 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

In June, Best Buy launched an ambitious customer service initiative — a swarm of thousands of technology experts that could be reached any time, via Twitter. Big bucks were spent advertising the program, the "Twelpforce," during prime-time television.

The system is elegant in its simplicity: Send a question or request for help via Twitter to @twelpforce, your request will be snagged by an appropriate team member — whether they're on the sales floor or at home checking their tweets after hours — and they'll get in touch with you to try to help.

I made a substantial purchase from Best Buy about six months ago, a new desktop computer. I had been misled by the employee that helped me select it — I wanted an inexpensive machine that was good for playing slightly older games, and was directed toward a computer whose video card made it a bad fit.

So, on a recent Thursday afternoon, I sent this tweet to the Twelpforce team:

@twelpforce: Bought this computer from Best Buy http://bit.ly/YNtbZ salesguy said it would be good for gaming. It is not. What to do?

Within a half hour, I had this reply tweeted back to me:

#twelpforce @jamesbickers Send us an email at twelpforce@bestbuy.com so we can talk about how we can help.

That tweet came to me from a different Twitter account, this one named "agent 3012." So I did as instructed and wrote to that address right away.

Here we see a potential breakdown of the Twelpforce system: I'm savvy enough to recognize that email address as a generic address, and therefore realized the need to include the agent's number in my communication. But it's reasonable to assume that this will not occur to most users, and they will therefore initiate a whole new customer service interaction that loses all the benefit of the Twitter interaction.

My detailed email to Agent 3012 did indeed get routed to the right person, and that night at 8 o'clock I got a lengthy reply from him that offered two different solutions to my computing problem — only one of which involved an additional purchase. It was a personable and very helpful email, and contained a couple of stray grammatical mistakes (which reassured me that it was actually written by a human being, not copy/pasted from a FAQ somewhere).

Ultimately, my problem was solved, via email. And this is perhaps the biggest shortcoming in this Twitter initiative: it is not really about Twitter at all. There's no part of this interaction that couldn't have been handled with email alone. The response time was stellar, but could just as easily have been achieved with diligent inbox monitoring.

Still, Twitter is the buzz du jour, and the Twelpforce program gives Best Buy a legitimate reason to tell the story of how it takes customer service seriously.

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Expert opinions on the Twelpforce concept

If nothing else, Twelpforce is a stroke of public relations genius, well worth the time and energy spent (and the money spent promoting it during prime time). But will it amount to more than just positive vibes?

The experts I spoke to are guardedly optimistic on the concept, but both feel that some hurdles need to be overcome. Jacob Morgan, social media consultant and author of the forthcoming social-media-for-business book "Twittface," said the company didn't fully consider the branding ramifications of having a large number of people communicating through a single Twitter account. He also worries about the ease with which imposters can pretend to be Best Buy staffers and mislead customers.

I put this problem to the Twelpforce (via Twitter, of course), and was educated on the structure of the company's multiple accounts: each agent has his or her own Twitter account, and each one of those is set up to automatically flow into the "mother account" (twitter.com/twelpforce). So, as Agent 14677 assures me, "We are real if it shows up in the feed."

Giving employees the keys to the Twitter kingdom also represents a real loosening of the controls, and Sam Alpert, who has consulted with companies like Dunkin Donuts on how to implement social media, worries about how Best Buy will maintain a consistent and uniformed presence.

"Yes, there is a code of conduct, but how will the company keep everyone in line?" he said. "It's hard enough to manage employees in-person at the store, let alone monitoring employees' conversations off-hours, when they're at home in their boxers drinking beer."