You are a public relations professional, specializing in crisis management. Your client, Best Buy, took a whole bunch of orders online, and now can’t deliver.
What advice would you give them? Comment below.
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Best Buy has some serious quality control and customer service issues to address now–but it’s not insurmountable. Besides their immediate communications back to the affected customers (which I believe has already occurred), Best Buy must now make this right by offering steep discounts and/or gift cards to these customers. Perhaps a “Christmas in January” campaign with mind-blowing discounts to re-engage these distraught customers.
Best Buy is a good company, but they messed up. They just simply need to over-communicate to their customers, say their sorry, offer incentives to the customer to come-back…and hope they forgive.
Best Buy will be fine.
Thanks for the comment, Casey. Best Buy appears to have recognized the mess, and to have reached out to the customers who were affected. If I could quarrel with their approach, it would be that they did not make their efforts public.
The damage goes much wider than just the individual purchasers affected — the rest of the online-buying public now has to wonder whether they can trust Best Buy to deliver on their promises in the future. I think they need to let people know:
1. Exactly what they did to take care of the people who didn’t get their merchandise on time.
2. What they are doing, internally, to make sure this problem doesn’t happen again.