Best Buy Support Questionnaire Backlash

I recently signed up for Reward Zone membership at Best Buy. Ever since they opened the nearby store, I've been shopping there more, rather than going to Circuit City. Could this be related to Circuit City's economic problems? I buy a lot of electronic stuff. Anyway...

I was trying to log in to my Reward Zone account, and I failed. I think the reason was that I had given my old Verizon phone number when I opened the account. I sometimes do this to keep from getting sales calls. Anyway, I couldn't log in, and I hadn't thought to try that number to process the log in, so I filled out their support form and explained my issue.

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Within an hour or two, I got a response from their support department. The support guy had filled out the form for me and sent me login details. With that info I was able to login and change my account, just as I would have hoped. Support success -- who knew? And then things went awry.

A couple of days later, I got a survey request. Best Buy wanted me to fill out a survey to determine how well their support system worked. I'm happy to do these because I think they benefit the process. If you're interested enough to ask how things went, then perhaps you're interested in improving. Not that this support request needed improving, mind you, just that I thought they'd like to know that everything went "just fine".

The survey was a multi-part questionnaire that might as well have asked for blood samples. I guess the bottom line is that I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition. They surprised me with a ton of questions that had nothing to do with my support experience. They asked me if I was likely to recommend shopping at Best Buy to family and friends. Not just one question, but three: one each related to consumer electronics, large appliances, and computer equipment.

I just wanted to tell them that everything went as expected, and I ended up in a marketing survey. I suppose I could have simply quit the questionnaire, but I started to get to the point where I needed to tell them that their questionnaire sucked. Here's what I told them:

I couldn't log in to my Best Buy account. I asked to have access to the account. The representative sent me access instructions. It wasn't exemplary service or poor service -- the porridge was "just right", and it was also "just porridge".
This was not rocket science. This was not an angry customer request. Frankly, this survey has upset me more and wasted more of my time than the entirety of my customer service experience. If anything has lowered my opinion of Best Buy, it's that they're asking questions about whether I'm more or less likely to buy things because of what amounts to a password reset on a rewards account. Stupid.

I don't mean to turn this into another online Best Buy rant. There are plenty of those and Geek Squad trouble stories online that I don't need to contribute to that. What I'm trying to address here is the weird reaction to support that companies now have. It's like a support request is an excuse to inundate with a ton of unrelated questions.

The moral of the story: If you're going to take customer support seriously, then don't intermingle it with marketing and brand opinion.

Eric Fraterman

Dec 19, 2008 07:20am

This company follows best practices in customer service and customer loyalty management and is clearly dedicated to Listening and does not deserve to be blasted, in my view. These practices are not marketing practices!

I would like to make two points in support of this:

Each and every touchpoint can turn into a Moment of Truth and it is important to keep the finger on the pulse that the customer experience was as desired and that nothing festers.

Customer satisfaction does not necessarily translate into customer loyalty. The one question for probing loyalty is the one that asks about your propensity to recommend the vendor.

This vendor clearly wants to make sure that things work for your and for them and needs to be applauded. It is hard to determine for them what for you is a minor incident or not. For another person this might have been a bigger irritant. Hard to say.... By the same token if something had gone wrong you would have been happy to have this feedback opportunity.

owen

Dec 19, 2008 09:32am

I'm certainly not going to be hornswoggled into thinking that this behavior is OK by someone who sells it for a living. "loyalty management"? "Moment of Truth"? Get over yourself.

If something had gone wrong, I would have been happy to have the feedback opportunity, yet still annoyed that I was being asked questions about loyalty in the context of this interaction.

Loyalty is gained by behaving in a way that generates loyalty. Handling a support request properly would do that. Asking me excessive questions about my brand loyalty during a support feedback questionnaire leads me to believe that the only reason they provided support was so that I would recommend that my grandmother would buy a dishwasher from them.

What I'm talking about is a questionnaire that is designed to gauge loyalty, inappropriately stuffed into what should have been a "How'd we do?" questionnaire that completely ruined the experience, and negated any positive motion they may have made in gaining my loyalty.