Geeks On The Street: What Feedback Do You Get From Your Techies?

evolving its channel worldview

I haven't ever had a briefing by the Best Buy management team, but we've written plenty about not just the Best Buy for Business operation and its ties to companies like Microsoft but also their Geek Squad services arm for handling home technology integration projects. And I saw a presentation yesterday that gave me a firsthand view into just how profoundly this company could potentially impact the technology world.

Plenty of VARs that I know like to brag about how much better their services technicians are than those from the Geek Squad. I'd wager to say that's mostly true for most things.

But the Geek Squad, which, by the way, is apparently now 14,000-people strong and represented in every single Best Buy location according to Best Buy CIO Bob Willett, isn't just an outbound techie network. The Geeks are information gathers who the average citizen can trust. And there-in lies Best Buy's most formidable weapon, techies that customers feel comfortable talking to.

"We are no longer a secret society. We don't know what we don't know," said Willett in a keynote presentation this week in Nashville at Forrester Research's IT Forum 2007.

Best Buy and Willett have definitely bought into the idea that the best retailers at least will be run by their customers. OK, so that sounds kind of radical, but the fact is that most people know what they want. Conversely, they don't want to be told what to buy.

"It isn't about us having all the content. It isn't about us providing all the content. It is about us providing the solution and the solution provisioning for the content they want," said Willett.

What's more, Best Buy is treating its internal customers (aka its employees) the same way. Many managers who have read about Best Buy's scheduling policy, which basically leaves it up to you to figure out with your team to get your work done in whatever hours you feel appropriate, scoff at that notion. I struggle constantly with the whole work-life thing myself, but I've always found that if you have the right people working together as a team, things get done. Provided the team is a true team.

Best Buy's whole new take on collaboration, which is a very Web 2.0 philosophy, is probably one of the reasons behind the partnerships that Best Buy plans to build with many of you. We've written a bit about that already, but stay tuned for more details in coming weeks.

Meanwhile, you may want to ask yourself whether or not you're enabling your teams at the front lines -- the engineers and support staff interacting with your customers -- not just to solve the problem at hand but to predict the needs of the future.