Best Buy Idea X Blog

Hey all,

I wanted to give you a brief update or overview of what has been happening with your ideas, and share with you how important it is to hear your voices out here. It’s been about 10 months since we officially opened the doors to IdeaX and here is what has happened in those ten months. Five of the top six ideas on IdeaX are either in some form of consideration, testing or implementation.

Insignia Android Tablet – designed by employees and customers

This has been one of our fastest rising ideas to date and it is currently under consideration, by members of our Insignia Private Label Team and other leaders within Best Buy. Currently customers and Best Buy employees can share their ideas on what would make the ideal Insigna Android Tablet in our Currents Section of IdeaX.

Create Electronic Receipts

This is one of our longest standing ideas, and right now there are tests being done in the Phoenix market using Intuit QuickReceipts to put this idea to work, and help determine how it could roll out to all Best Buy locations nationwide. View this post from a member of our Reward Zone team for the latest e-receipt update.

Get rid of those stupid plastic boxes that are way too hard to open

While we haven’t made a lot of changes with our vendors products, our Private Label group that oversees our Insignia, Dynex and Rocketfish product lines have taken this idea and continue to develop customer and environmentally conscious packaging options that are easier to open.  More updates to come on this one.

Reward Zone Points Redemption

We heard that you wanted easier ways to redeem your Reward Zone points. Our Reward Zone leaders are currently working on tests that include new functionality within an iPhone app and an in store kiosk. More details to come on this.

Free Wifi in the stores

I just recently wrote a blog update on this about a 10-store test in our NY market offering free Wi-Fi to customers. We’d love to hear more about what information you’d like to access when you are in our stores, and begin to build experiences around that through free Wi-Fi access, smart phones and smart phone apps. You can share your ideas here.

These are just five of the top six ideas on the site. There have been numerous ideas with fewer votes, that teams at Best Buy are using to guide their current and future thinking. We will do our best to connect and comment on these as progress is made. In addition many of you have commented on how to improve this site and we continue to add new functionality, including idea submissions on Twitter, a new Twitter IdeaX page (come follow us) and a Currents feature on IdeaX that helps to bucket similar ideas and lets us ask you questions about what’s on your mind.

Thanks to everyone who has submitted an Idea, Comment or vote this year. Keep them coming. Your voices do make a difference.

Hey all,

There’s some great news around one of the most popular ideas on IdeaX. Best Buy has been testing Free Customer Wi-Fi in 10 stores in the New York market. This is an exiting first step in turning our stores on for our customers to access content like our m.bestbuy.com site (including product reviews), your Reward Zone information (including points and purchases) and even connect to feedback sites like IdeaX and Twelpforce while you shop.

As a technology company, we know it doesn’t make sense for our customers to have to leave to connect to the Internet—and in many stores customer 3G access on their smart phones can be spotty at best.

Through this test Best Buy is looking to understand better how customers like you are connecting in our stores, so we can turn on new experiences while you shop. Right now the team working on this roll out is looking to learn from the NY test while working to get the budget to offer free Wi-Fi in more stores across the nation.

We’d love to continue to hear your thoughts and suggestions, on how you’d like to use Wi-Fi in our stores, and what experiences you’d like to have with our stores on your web-enabled phones.

You can share your thoughts and ideas on this topic in our Wi-Fi Current here.

This is your chance to shape the future experiences you have at Best Buy.

Hey all,

We’ve noticed recently that there have been a few occasions of rude and/or offensive comments between users on the site within various idea discussions. I’m offering this reminder to keep it clean and show respect to others. Disagreement and debate on ideas is great, as it can make ideas better and fuel new ideas. Although when disagreements become personal that falls outside the intended purpose of this site. If you feel like lobbing a personal insult, please refer back to our terms of use. They are not acceptable. If you choose to ignore those rules we will contact you directly and warn you that your access priviledges will be suspended if it is not cleaned up (regardless of your contribution level). So please, keep the great ideas, comments and even the healthy debate coming—just keep it clean.

P.S. Thanks to the 99.9% of you out here on IdeaX who show respect out here all the time. It’s appreciated.

Hey all,

We wanted to let you know that the 2nd most popular Idea post “Create Electronic Receipts” has been fully considered and reviewed. Here’s the feedback we’ve heard from the business team on the project:

“Thanks for all of the great ideas and comments on electronic receipts! We wanted you to know Best Buy is excited about this idea and we are actively looking into ways to deliver electronic receipts for customers.”

As a result, we have updated the status of the idea to REVIEWED. As you can imagine, there are processes and systems that need to be in place to accomplish something like this. So we will continue to update you as progress continues to be made on this idea. Thanks for putting your voices behind this and other ideas on the site.

And please, keep the great ideas coming in!

Hey all,

I wanted to give you an update on the status of a few hot Ideas. Currently the top 3 Ideas on the site are under review. This means various business teams at Best Buy are considering the ideas in some shape or form. The top voted ideas include:

Get rid of those stupid plastic boxes — Posted by Paul
There is new work already underway with Best Buy’s own Private Label brand team around new package development for some of their products. This is a small start, but exciting that our own house brands are leading this charge.

Create Electronic Receipts — Posted by fredneil2
There are a lot of conversations happening about the how and when. It’s a fantastic green opportunity and could be a great convenience for customers. There is no definitive answer, but it is certainly under review.

Reward Zone Points Redemption — Posted by s_foy
You can view the posted comments from our Reward Zone team under the actual Idea post. The Reward Zone team is always looking for new ways to improve the program and points redemption is a hot topic on the IdeaX site. A few ideas will be tested out over the next several months to see how members like them. More to come on this.

Your voices are being heard. In some cases your ideas are helping businesses make informed decisions about the future. In other cases, your ideas are reaffirming things we may already be considering. We will continue to update you on the status of these ideas and others. And thanks again for all of the fantastic ideas, comments and of course your votes. Keep them coming.

Hey all,

Here’s a request from micheleazar of our Mobile team looking for your thoughts on improvements to Best Buy’s Mobile site. Read below then, comment and vote at.

http://bestbuyideax.com/ideas/1326

micheleazar: We’d like your help enhancing Best Buy’s Mobile Site, m.bestbuy.com; please vote on this post if you like our ideas for release 3. Here’s what we’re thinking: 1.) Order Tracking/Account Lookup including gift card balance, SMS alert when in store pick up item is ready 2.) New Promotional offers, financial, in-store deals by location 3.) Extend Checkout: PayPal 4.) Enable Sharing: wish lists, SMS friends, Gift Registry 5.) Check out via Mobile I-phone Apps, Add pre-order ability within apps. BTW, the ability to buy stuff is coming soon! And, we’re not looking at mobile web alone as the big idea, we’re viewing the end user benefit as unlocking more utility within the multi-channel shopping experience at a local level. The features we can’t fit into a release, we may build out via mobile apps to learn more about what appeals to customers.

Yes. IdeaX has moved into the realm of gathering your input for job descriptions. Emerging Media job descriptions that is. Its a long story, and I won’t go into all of the details because you can check them out on our CMO’s blog right here: http://tinyurl.com/nyzv3l

Anyway, we thought if we are asking how would you improve Best Buy, why not start with giving you input on a position that will influence your experience with Best Buy—particularly in the Social Networking space.

New to IdeaX? Just signed up? We’ve been getting some feedback that some new user’s ideas and comments haven’t been showing up on the site.

TIP: If you’ve completed the sign up and agreed to the site terms, then check your in-box for an activation e-mail from us. You’ll need to follow the link in the e-mail to activate your account before your ideas or comments will post. If the e-mail doesn’t appear in your in-box, check your junk mail. If your security setting are high, the activation e-mail may be being filtered.

Again, thanks for everyone’s participation.

Hey all. If you haven’t noticed, we have recently been making a few site updates and improvements. The biggest addition is a new Idea search function that allows you to search for common ideas.

I want to give a big call out to Mishubear for the IdeaX post “Add searching capabilities to IdeaXchange”. It was a great idea, and definitely needed.

We’ll be making improvements and refining the site over the next few weeks before we start pointing more people to IdeaX. I also want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has participated in the site so far. We’ve been far from perfect on our end, but your participation and voices are helping us figure out how we can get better at it—both on this site and in our stores. Thanks again.

Just an update on our prolonged outage on Thursday. Apparently the issue didn’t start with technology…rather it began with Mother Nature. A lightning strike to Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service that hosts IdeaX caused the initial outage.

I find it a little ironic that it all started with the violent side of Mother Nature, and ended with our team pinging our systems guy who was trying to take in the more peaceful side of Mother Nature in the Minnesota Northwoods.

You can find the related story right here (about the server outage not our systems guy).

http://bit.ly/11C7Lf