Blue Shirt Nation
Two members of the marketing team at Best Buy were looking to gain more insight into the customer experience in their stores nationally. I heard these guys speak when I attended the Business Innovation Factory event in Providence, RI last year. They realized that those with the greatest knowledge of their customer base were their employees. They created the Blue Shirt Nation, a research site dedicated to “connecting employees to share knowledge, best practices, frustrations, aspirations and a few jokes”. They were able to start getting some understandings of their customer’s perspective that allowed them a better sense of what was going on in their stores. Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling, creators of the site, also found this as a deeper tool for engaging and motivating employees.
“When we set it up two years ago, we weren’t turning on a social network,” explains Koelling. “We were turning on a research tool. Boy, did we have it wrong.”
“We found out real fast that employees didn’t want to play that game,” continues Bendt. “Instead, they gave us new rules and told us what they wanted on the site and at the company. We shut up pretty quickly and realized we needed to just listen.”
Best Buy attrition rate is about 60% annually, however, the 20,000 employees involved in Blue Shirt National only left the organization at levels of 8-12%. How can you make understanding your clientele not just an exercise for highly paid research companies, but something in the DNA of your employees? Frontline employees are the experts in the day to day care and feeding of your constituents. Why not give them the responsibility to collect information, share ideas and create solutions that work?
It’s gotten even more interesting for the company when they now allow members of the team to start proposing new ventures and initiatives as a result of the data they have collected. This is something that the founders of Blue Shirt Nation or the executives at Best Buy never expected.
What ideas do you have or have you used to better understand your clientele or better engage your employees as they look to help your organization move into the future?
Keep an eye out for my future blog posting on Lead User Design (LUD).
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Yesterday, Stephen and I attended the Boston Fundraising Summit (http://www.cfnps.org/boston2009.aspx) put on by the Center for Non Profit Success (http://www.cfnps.com). Stephen was on the Cause Marketing panel and, knowing that he planned some engaging interactive exercises, I thought it’d be good to capture on digital video. I borrowed a great camera, but had to replace the nearly full Sony DVD-RW discs. Luckily, there was a Best Buy, so I went over at the lunch break.
I walked in the door, asked for and received directions. I asked the first blue-shirt I saw for help, and David S. was on the case. He brought me to the right spot and showed me my options: Memorex DVD-RW (older format) or Sony DVD+RW (newer format). The disc in the camera was a Sony DVD-RW. Would the Sony +RW work, or did I need the older -RW, but by Memorex.
Failure was not an option, so David said “Let me check to see if we have Sony -RWs in the back.” They did, so I did, and you’ll be able to see the video as soon as I figure out how to get it off the camera!