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Comments on post “Assist”

@rstephens · Founder, Geek Squad. Co-founder, @assist

I wanted to share a story about why I'm so excited about messaging. It's 2009, and I've been at Best Buy 7 years since selling Geek Squad to them. I'm sitting in a meeting where some PR firm is pitching their next year's projects for Best Buy. The bid? 3 million. As I was oft to do, I'm on twitter - watching pissed off customers tweet one problem after another. I turned to Best Buy's CMO at the time, Barry Judge and said, "What if our PR strategy was to listen to customers?" That's when we took a small piece of that money and built an in-house twitter tool to allow customers to message customer support. It was similar to a custom version of ZenDesk. The vision was to imagine EVERY employee of a company accessible through real-time chat, use the data to predict problems before they occur, and empower employees to help. The most people we were able to get on that system was 5,000 out of 150,000 employees. I left Best Buy in 2012, and sadly there are likely less than 5,000 still using it. We are excited to try and accelerate 2 things: expose more APIs that allow for customer self-service, like scheduling, pre-ordering, queuing, requests, etc. Further, when you need to talk to a business, that you can do it through a single interface where YOU have a copy of the conversation "for quality purposes". We all have a long way to go, but I hope you can see what kinds of service could be delivered in the coming months and years.