Susanne Dansey’s Blog

And so it came to pass that Best Buy teamed up with Carphone Warehouse and sent forth an ‘army’ of computer ’specialists’ to ‘help’ consumers struggling with the digital revolution…

Armed with police-style badges, their Geekmobiles, and FBI type uniforms, the US squad declares it will “campaign across the country, infiltrating Best Buy retail locations to systematically root out any computer problem and offer technological guidance to all those who seek it”.

In the UK, we can look forward to a 50/50 joint venture between BB and CW to service customers in the UK and across Europe. We’ll expect to see them arrive on our shores in January 2007.

So with DSG International (they own Currys and PC World) announcing plans to invest £50m in TheTechGuys (a team of 3,000 ‘experts’ ablet to offer technology help), what can we in our current format expect to experience with this new ‘competition’. (source: The Sunday Times)

Some view the opportunity for the Geek Squad as a positive one and there are many other opinions like these bouncing around the Net. From a business customer’s point of view I’m not sure if they’ll get excited if they get good service from their existing provider. That is unless they have to make a personal call-out that wasn’t covered under their support contract or you weren’t available. I have to say I like the marketing angle that these guys take and the website is remarkable and you’re not likely to forget the orange and black image they present to you.

Their beliefs fall in line with many of which most of us subscribe to; “Our mission is to alleviate the world’s* computer problems, educate people to fearlessly embrace technology and practice the art of human interaction”.

So why does this sound like a computer talking when what they really should be saying is “we understand our customers because we know their businesses and we empathise with their experiences”?

Well guys, that’s where we come in… Microsoft accredited or not, we are Small Business Specialists - that’s a company that provides specialist services and solutions to small businesses and I believe we have the upper hand. Most of us have been in business for long enough to have the experience and knowledge that our customers rely on when they want to move forward.

There is plenty of space in our market for retail task forces like this to co-exist with us. There are a bunch of clients out there who just don’t sit well with the likes of you and I and guys like the Geek Squad and Press F1 (aka TheTechGuys) answer that need. If you want to jump ship now and get a job with the TheTechGuys, then have a look here, if not, you can at least see where their branches are popping up in (keyword: Press F1).

But don’t forget though why it’s good to work for a small business.

With most SBS partners looking towards managed services as a solution, I would be more alert to the fact that much bigger vendors (some are your partners) are already going down the same route as us. But to be honest, why would one of your clients want to leave you for a bigger company that just won’t have the ability to ‘mirror’ them? The only reason they will leave you will be because they have lost confidence in you.

The big guys in retail are not going to sit back and let us play with all the toys in the sandpit for too long. Look at how retailers like the Dixons Group have had to re-engineer their corporate infrastructure to avoid further suffering based on a ’stack ‘em high, sell ‘em low’ theory. They want a piece of our pie… and because they do the sales turnover needed to keep their partners in business, well there isn’t any business reason for anyone to advise them otherwise. It’s exactly what I would do if I was in charge of DSG (I’d have that yacht too!).

A recent Gartner report has forcasted that despite double-digit growth in PC sales, industry revenue is likely to decline 2.5 percent to US$198.5 billion in 2006. As PC vendors drop the prices of their desktops and notebooks in order to survive, those selling it need to find another way of generating the revenue needed to keep them in business. That means the big guys are forced to look at what has worked for others and adapt it as a template for them.

If you are concerned by the recent developments in our market, then I’m sorry to say that I bet these guys have been planning this for a while now. They have a good game plan so you better make sure that yours incorporates an edge that will keep you in business long after some of your competitors have fallen by the wayside.

We posed this concern as a question to Erick Simpson in SBS Show #26 (and it hasn’t even been released yet - that’s an exclusive! I knew you’d be excited!) and hopefully you’ll see that those of us who are dynamic and thinking two steps ahead of the game will see this move within IT retail as an opportunity to partner or offload those guys who we can’t afford to care for.

NB: my apologies for sticking inverted commas around some of the words used at the beginning of this post. I do this to emphasise some of the words used by these retail groups but would like it known that these are not my words and do not necessarily reflect my opinion.

*Okay so “World’s” is maybe a little bit optimistic for some of us but as a global community I think we have a fair shot at matching this!