Dear Best Buy,
You have a great retail presence. Personally, I’m not sure what I would have done with those wasted hours spent roaming around your stores if you didn’t exist. On top of that, you really seem to be headed in the right direction with your corporate culture.
So, riddle me this:
How is it that I walked into a Best Buy store in my area ready to spend an outrageous amount of money on a new, shiny Apple iMac only to find out from a store clerk that “Best Buy carries Apple products but this particular store does not”? I was then referred to a store about 25 minutes away (and near a major metropolitan mall that conveniently has an Apple store).
At this point I am disappointed (instant gratification was the objective of this particular shopping trip) and might as well just buy an iMac from the Apple store since I am headed in that direction.
The takeaway: If you are a major consumer electronics chain lets make sure that the most sought after consumer electronics devices (iPod, iMac, Guitar Hero 3) are actually stocked in your stores.
No harm, no foul in this case. But you have lost my sale to the Apple store at the local mall. In the immortal words of The Dude, “That’s a real bummer, man.”
It was a normal Friday night in my household. The kids were in bed and the wife was relaxing. Me? I was tirelessly working away at creating something interesting on the internet. It was a standard evening for our household. At 8:30 PM our AT&T internet connection went down…
Reluctantly, I called your tech support number after my standard troubleshooting did not yield results. Your phone representative told me that my account had been suspended. They gave me a phone number to call and were not able to tell me anything else. How odd.
I called the supplied phone number and discovered that it was the “Bellsouth Abuse Department”. My account had been flagged for abuse. How very odd.
Here’s the not-so-funny part. You disconnected my account on Friday evening *after* the abuse department closed….on a holiday weekend. This meant that I would not be able to regain DSL access to the internet until Tuesday morning at the earliest. For an active internet user this is akin to taking my crack pipe away. Shame on you.
Here’s the funny part. I called Earthlink and they were more than happy to provide me with an internet connection. The line was provisioned and I was on my way down the information superhighway before you could even call me back.
Amazing. Your OWN doing caused me to shift my business to Earthlink and they were more than happy to take it. This is not only a lesson for AT&T but for all other consumer facing companies in the world. Remember this: I have choices. And if you push me to far I will exercise my right to make those choices and shift my business to a competitor. Simple, right?
The take away: Consumer marketing is increasingly all about the experience. Look at the tools that have been created to capture that experience. The Net Promoter Score comes to mind. Focus on your experience and, if you’re product speaks for itself, you will *easily* rise to the top.
Oh yeah….and in case anyone was wondering, AT&T explained to me that my account had been sending spam so the assumption was that one of my computers had a “virus on something”. I couldn’t even tell you what the email address on this account was let alone the last time that it was used. After admitting to me on the phone that he/she (the Bellsouth Abuse Department representative) was “not very technical” my account was turned back on immediately……and summarily canceled by me after being transferred to the billing department.
Skype is unavailable for x number of days and the party line is “Microsoft did it.” Unbelievable.
