Dear Best Buy, Hire me and I will make you profitable again

Last week I had the opportunity to go into a Best Buy. Now if you don't know a lot about Best Buy's recent struggles Best Buy is being hit hard by bit online retailers like Amazon and EBay. Best Buy has a ton of overhead compared to these companies because they have to pay for their physical locations. This in turn raises their prices and customers want the cheapest deal, especially when it comes to technology. So what should you do if your company is failing and no one wants to come to your overpriced store where their warranties mean basically nothing? Now Best Buy is trying. They have made an ingenious move to start partnering with phone companies to create smaller Best Buy stores focusing on only phones and accessories. Also if you go into a Best Buy the first display you will ALWAYS find will be phones. This comes from the thought of putting the thing most desired at the front of the store to immediately capture your customer.

For these small improvements I commend Best Buy, but they other day when I went into their store I almost wept at the sight I saw. I saw SO much potential. I'm not a business owner and I'm not a customer analysist. But in the short years in the service industry of IT, I have learned a thing of two about keeping your customers happy.

First off, why would you come to a physical location to buy something? I can buy laundry detergent online. I can buy cloths, shoes, kitchen supplies, furniture  games, heck, even food online. I can see customer reviews of all these items and I can get exactly what I want with all those items. They best part about online, is it would probably be cheaper than buying it at a physical store, if I just look around enough. So why the heck do physical locations of stores exist anymore? Convince and physical appeal.

I think some people think that buying online is convenient, but isn't much more convenient to get into your car and have the product in your hands within an hour rather than 3 days later? When I want new cloths, I want them now and don't want to wait for them. NOW. Thats the society we live in today and physical location of stores full of products give us that. So why should technology be ANY different?

Honestly I think having that physical store for some people today is most important in the tech world. I have talked with so many people about "what type of external hard drive should I get?" or "should I get the ipad 2 or ipad 3?" or "How do you do that with your phone?" Not everyone is proficient in "Googling" an answer to a question and just end up buying a high end piece of technology that they barely understand what they should use it for except to maybe "look at facebook."

Best Buy needs to create a customer experience. They need to be able to make someone feel welcome in their store. The experience should allow a customer to leave the store excited about their experience and ready to go back again and not focusing on how much they just spent. If they don't have a product, then help them find it! Set up terminals that Best Buy workers can search the online world for the specific product the customer wants (obviously companies that have partnered with Best Buy for this special "feature"). I know I have walked into Best Buy many many times hoping to find a computer part only to be slightly sad that they don't have it and I now have to order it online and wait 3 days to get it. How awesome would it be to have a employee come up to me and say they don't have it but they would love to order it for me and even ship it to my address from their partnered company Newegg.com? It would give Newegg.com extra business and then Best Buy could get a percentage of that profit, rather than just giving up a sale to the online world?

How about knowing your customers knowledge level? I know when I go into a store, I don't want to go in and talk to a lady about how "beautiful" the Ipad looks. I want to know the full specs of it, why should I buy the Ipad over the Nexus? So how to you know a customers knowledge level? Give your employees "tech levels" by possibly colored shirts or name tags. Many Best Buy stores have very techy employees but also have the very high level tech employees too. So create a simple system to show the customer what the colors mean and then they can choose who they want to talk to and are not "belittled" by the employee.

My ideas are not perfect, but I truly believe this is the direction Best Buy should be taking. There is a lot of work that would need to be done to create a successful business strategy, but I think that they can do it. I fully understand the change that would need to happen, but I think that it is needed. Best Buy needs to redeem themselves as a top retailer of technology, otherwise they will become another failed company like Circuit City.

This is my full out plea to Best Buy:

Please think about your customer experience! Your physical locations truly have so much potential, but when a customer walks into your store and is ignored by all your employees when they walk around your whole store, that can really be frustrating. When a customer has to walk around your whole store just to find a universal remote, that is not a good thing. And when a customer gets frustrated and ends up looking at Kindle's competition, the Nook, don't have a employee come up to them and try and sell them a Nook despite the fact that they have explained they already own a Kindle and do not want to switch. More than likely they were probably looking for something else and just got distracted by the flashiness of new technology.

What do you think of Customer Service and more importantly the Customer Experience?

Legacy Phone Security

Below is a blog that I wrote a few months ago on my personal blog. An annotated version of it is below.


Recently I finished a book called  KingPin. It is a book on the life of Max Vision (Butler) aka Iceman and the cyber criminal underground. Its really a good book and has really opened my eyes to how vulnerable the cyber world is. Knowledge is power, but no one ever said with knowledge come only good. It has re-sparked an interest in security and understanding infrastructure for me.

Along with reading KingPin, I had a huge security breach in my twitter account. The trickest part about it though was the fact that all parties involved didn't even know there was a security break... including the accidental hacker.

I received a weird tweet from one of my friends on Tuesday and looked at the tweet they replied to and realized I did not send it. My phone had been charging  out in the open at the retreat center and so I figured one of my new friends saw me unlock my phone and then they used that to their advantage to tweet on my behalf. So I kept my phone with me until I figured out who the culprit was. My friend later tweeted back to me and low and behold the hacker replied back to my friend "who are you?". I had my phone with me, someone was accessing my account from somewhere else.

At this point I started to get a bit more nervous, but figured that it was still one of my friends screwing with me.. somewhere. So I watched all of my social networking sites and email to see if there was a intrusion on them (if there had been, that would mean my passwords were compromised), nothing. So only twitter was hacked by one of my friends.... but how? All of the boxes that I signed into are either with me or in my closet at my parents house password protected..... My work. 

This last summer  I worked with my brother-in-law at his company and after I left I know he took my computer so he could have all the code I had written over the summer, no biggy. But then I realized I was signed into twitter on that computer and he could have noticed and decided to play a nice prank on me (he's soo nice...). I texted him and he told me that he wasn't on my work computer... at this point I was starting to panic a bit, my password must have been cracked.

It had to be a personal attack though because most bots, hackers, and malware will only crack your password and put general crap on your feed but never interact with followers. So at this point I changed my password on my twitter. That would cut this hacker from my account, once his cache refreshed. I waited a few hours to ensure that he would be kicked off and asked my friend to tweet me again to see if they got a reply and sure enough they did, "Who the hell are you, how did you get my number!". Weird.

All of the text messages were confusing, asking who my friend was and this last one the hacker referred to the reply as a "number". But why? I thought about it for a bit and everything became clear and I became extremely angry I did not catch it before and my mind exploded with thoughts about the third party privacy world we live in today.

I checked my twitter account and sure enough my settings confirmed my realization. My old phone was linked to the twitter account. I didn't port my number from US Cellular when I moved to AT&T because I use a google number. Everyone sees my google number so there was no point in porting over my USC number (it costed a pretty penny to do so). Well sites like facebook, twitter, emails, and other social sites allow you to link up your phone to get live updates via text message. For reasons I don't know these sites will not forward updates to a google number and so I had to put in my actual USC number.

When I dropped my number at USC the ONLY explanation they gave me for keeping my number is "you will have to tell all your contacts you have a new number and it will be a very tedious process, paying a little extra upfront cost for connivance is worth it". That was it. Nothing about "every network you have your number linked to will have to be deleted and readded if you want to keep your security". I don't know about about the general population, but if they would have said that, I probably would have kept my number. Third Party failure to keep their customers secure.

On the other end though, social networking third parties. To update and "link" your phone with their site all you do is type your number in, they send you text and you reply with a confirmation number the site tells you. This is a fairly secure 3 way handshake. But what happens when a new user takes the number? There is initial log in of the phone, but nothing after that. No verification each time someone replies to the site or anything. Third Party failure to fully secure and inform linked devices.

Yes, I am partly at fault for this as well. But me being a computer nerd, I could make these connections, but what if  I was a normal user? And what if my  "hacker" really wanted to screw with my account? I would have NO control over it. The only control I would have would be to delete my account. Fortunately for me, the guy was a nice trucker that just got a new phone. He was a nice and understanding guy by the way.

Moral of the story: Be aware of who you trust with your private information. And when involving third party companies with third party companies, security can potentially be breached.

I hope others find this interesting and learn from my mistake. Don't link your number to a device, link a manageable account.

Tech Philosophy

I am creating this blog because I haven't had many tech conversations after leaving Iowa State last year. During my college career I was challenged constantly about how Engineers manipulate the world and how technology is constantly changing the world as we know it. I loved those conversations in class and even better I loved having conversations about those topics with friends during group projects, after class, and enjoying a drink at the local pub. 

Since the crowd of people that I am around most often these days isn't the same engineering techy crowd thoughts and philosophies that I think and ponder about get pushed aside in my life. I would love to start conversations about the topics I bring up and hopefully readers of this blog would participate! I think college, along with my very particular analysis of the world around me allows me to really think about big picture. 

Hopefully there are others out there that find this blog useful and insightful!