The first question in Category 3 of the Baldrige Criteria asks: How do you identify and innovate product/educational/healthcare service offerings to meet the requirements and exceed the expectations of your customer groups and market segments?

Best Buy recently introduced an innovative approach to customer service that has the potential to meet customer requirements and exceed expectations for quick and accurate answers to their product questions, troubleshooting problems, and service issues.

The new service is called Twelpforce: Customers use Twitter to raise their issues with Best Buy, which has a thousand employees across all operations available to resolve those issues.

In his blog, Barry Judge, Best Buy’s chief marketing officer, wrote, “Twelpforce has the potential to be a resource for our customers in helping them do the things they aspire to do with technology…Secondly, I think Twelpforce can be a catalyst to think very differently across our company about customer service. No longer do we need to passively wait in our channels for people to come to us…we can actively seek out the conversations that increasingly are happening outside our channels. I also think this initiative can change our definition of customer service. No longer is customer service a department but something that all of us can do.”

Judge admits that Twelpforce is a very public experiment that carries a certain amount of risk, but it seems to be a good fit for a tech-savvy, social-media-conscious customer base. Such innovation is not limited to Best Buy: I know of at least one manufacturer whose sales people and technicians are using Twitter in the same way except as an internal mechanism for raising customer issues and asking questions and getting quick answers.

Are there applications of this new technology at your organization?

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