Best Buy + Windows Guru = Apple Store Experience?

CWmike writes "As part of Windows Vista's $300 million marketing rehab, Microsoft will hire an initial wave of 155 'Windows Gurus' to walk around Best Buy and Circuit City stores to answer customer questions and defend Vista's reputation against skeptics, reports say. Gurus will earn $20 an hour or more, plus benefits. (Apply here.) One way Windows Gurus will differ from Apple Geniuses is that they are not intended to be sources of free technical support for existing Vista users. 'The Guru role is to help sell Windows-based PCs. It is not to be an alternative tech support channel for Microsoft as this has no financial return beyond improved customer satisfaction,' Baker said. One reason: Windows Gurus could end up 'lightning rods for customers' frustrations with Vista.'"

Comments

Guru? Not really ...

[bestinshow]

Only people in marketing could come up with the term "guru" to mean "someone who can't help, and exists to market to you until you give in".

And Microsoft misses one of the myriad small points in why Apple is seen positively by so many people despite having software release management run by a Crurotarsan.

Re:Guru? Not really ...

[JustinOpinion]

Indeed. These "gurus" are just marketers under a different name. Of course, the intention is to deceive the customer into thinking they are getting impartial technical advice, when in fact they are getting a sales pitch. Some quotes from TFA show that people are already fooled:

"After years of monopolistic behavior, Microsoft is finally recognizing the need for the softer things, dealing with customers in a higher-touch way," said Lisa Bradner, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. "All of our research shows that customers want their hands held. They're tired of being dumped to a Web site where they have to look through some FAQs."

Yet the article points out that the purpose of the gurus is NOT to hand-hold with respect to fixing problems, or even selecting the most appropriate product. Rather, it is to convince the customer to buy a Vista computer. This isn't a "softer" approach: it is another avenue for them to continue their usual (monopolistic?) tactics.

I worry about this because most in-store customers will assume that the "gurus" are providing sound technical advice, but instead they are just trying to get them to buy something. The same could be said of the other store employees, I suppose; but in this case instead of steering the customer towards buying *something*, they will invariably steer the customer towards Vista. Regardless of whether or not it is the right choice for them.

I can see this causing headaches for the stores as well. When a customer seeks out an employee for help, they are typically not aware of the distinction between different departments. Customers may become frustrated when they ask a "guru" for help but said employee can't help them ("I'm looking for a new washer/dryer." "Have you considered this Windows Vista Home Media Center desktop computer?" "WTF?")

Re:Anyone named Bruno instantly hired

[BitterOldGUy]

FTA: The good thing is that Microsoft will be able to get Windows explained appropriately on the sales floor. Oh my God, does this sound ominous. Any Best Buy employee explaining Windows "inappropriately" will be taken out back by a Windows Guru and "evangelized".

It's Windows we're talking about here; not OSX.

Vista = Customer Satisfaction?

[psyque]

How could selling Vista machines possibly improve customer satisfaction?

Best Buy + Some Guy != Apple Store

[Foofoobar]

I use Apple and Linux at Home and Windows and Linux at work and I have to say that Apple (like Pixar) does a great job on polishing under the drawers; they don't do anything halfassed in the total experience. They control the product, the store and the whole experience for a reason... to make them look extremely polished and extremely in control.

Until Microsoft opens their own shops and controls their own hardware OEM, they can't quite duplicate the same experience that Apple has at their stores. They only thing they can do is create propoganda in a controlled environment. And Apple already has retail people and retail sections in Bestbuy locations so these MS people are going to have to compete on their turf; Apple people don't compete with anyone in their stores.

Microsoft hireing salespeople to push Vista.

[LWATCDR]

Windows Vista Guru = salesperson.
Good grief Vista must suck.
Their adds where people try Vista and say gee this doesn't suck.
Their ads with with Gates and Sienfeld.
Until now I thought that Vista was just too much pain for not enough gain. I thought that maybe Windows 7 would be better.
Now I get the feeling that Vista is the Yugo of OSs. It must really suck if they are having to push this hard.
I was going to put Vista 64 on my wife's new PC. Now I am going to rethink that one.

So, propaganda then?

[gstoddart]

Not to be overly cynical, but this sounds like paying a bunch of people to walk around and try to convince the user that the experience won't suck, has never sucked, and that I'm merely deluded.

I mean, how much of it will be true, and how much of it will simply sound like a sales pitch from someone who drank the Kool Aid?

Man, shopping in most electronics stores is annoying enough -- having some git wandering around stumping for Windows Vista is just one more nuisance to avoid. If I'm standing there looking at a PC, and after I've shooed the salesman away, I don't want to then have to deal with some MS shill.

Hearing that they won't actually be useful sources of information for existing customers only re-affirms my cynicism about this program.

Cheers

Not a chance

[FireStormZ]

The apple stores centers around 3 things

1) The Genius
2) An army of employees running around to help people
3) A non intimidating open and easy to navigate store

Everything they do hight lights those two things, because they can do your credit card purchase remotely they can spend more time helping people decide. They reserve so much of the store for their training sessions and demo units that the Apple store does not feel like a big box store. I don't have to work my was past cameras, dvd's, home appliances, and video games to get to the computers.

The apple gurus are *not* sales folks and I have had them send me other places rather than buy an over priced adapter (ironically they sent me to best buy) meanwhile the 'The (Microsoft) Guru role is to help sell Windows-based PCs'. Yea thats what MS need more sales pressure at best buy...

Re:Sales Experience

[91degrees]

So someone bought a piece of equipment, and expected it to last more than 5 months. You tell him that if he wants a printer to have such an epic lifetime he needs to stump up some extra cash, and use the weaselly "just doing my job" defence to avoid taking responsibility for your own actions.

I can see why he was upset.

Don't bother trying to solve problems...

[FranTaylor]

"as this has no financial return beyond improved customer satisfaction"

This just says it all about the entire Microsoft experience.

Only 155?

[Capt James McCarthy]

I guess that's all they could find for a "Guru" willing to accept $20.00 per hour. Sorry, but if you use "expert," "genius," or "guru" in your title, you will not see $20.00 per hour.

Re:Sales Experience

[bestinshow]

I'd be livid if something I bought for $500 broke after only 5 months use, and if I then found out that because I was living in a country with barely any consumer rights I had no way to get this sorted out in a fair manner. I'd rip someone's guts out if they were in any way associated with that purchase.

You have a reasonable expectation at purchase that the goods will last a certain minimum amount of time. One year should be a legal minimum for home electronics purchases. Full stop. It would stop some companies releasing utter crap onto the market as well, and thus the situation would improve for everyone.

Re:'lightning rods' for customer frustrations

[SatanicPuppy]

41,000 a year for a job with a low entry skill is "not bad"? Are you serious? It's 5k above the national average wage.

Re:Anyone named Bruno instantly hired

[ByOhTek]

what bothers me even more:

> The Guru role is to help sell Windows-based PCs.
? It is not to be an alternative tech support
> channel for Microsoft as this has no financial
> return beyond improved customer satisfaction,'

So, let me get this straight. They are trying to improve customer satisfaction by telling everyone how great it is, but not provide help to get it to do what they want.

Funny. That's /exactly/ my experience with Linux evangelizers, and the primary reason I don't use Linux.

Re:Sales Experience

[Free the Cowards]

I don't understand your story. Why would you have to buy a warranty to cover a failure 5 months after purchase? Wouldn't the original manufacturer's warranty cover it?

Re:Sales Experience

[GreenEggsAndSpam]

People need to remember that you CAN be pissed off at a poorly performing / defective / overly expensive / ugly products. It's perfectly OK to be angry.

What is NOT acceptable, under any conditions, is to take it out on the person who sold it (unless of course they were responsible for the construction / repair / destruction / damage / defilement / or it being vista). Gas is an ass-rape, but it's NOT the fault of the pump-jockey earning minimum wage.

The printer broke, it's not this guy's fault. He tried to sell the store's standard extended warranty, which would have saved aggravation (bad timing on the breakage), and unless this guy pointed it out in an asinine way ("If you bought the warranty like I told you to, you'd be fine, but you're cheap and screwed now, ain't ya?" type response), it was simply not his fault.

BTW: I don't work retail. I just sympathize with people getting blamed for things well beyond their control. I don't sympathize with them being dumber than dirt or the crappy attitudes many have.

Expensive sales people...

[Arthur Grumbine]

The overall expenditure on this "campaign" seems relatively minor in the scope of the whole "rehab" effort.
Assuming the full-time hours stated in TFA, and that they continue this for a whole year (not stated):
$20/hr=$40k/yr
155*40k=6.2 mil
6.2 mil = A little over 2% of their total rehab effort
What sucks even more from the perspective of being one of these "salespeople" is that you, unlike the other store salespeople, don't even have the opportunity for commission, which must make it even harder to internally justify the act of promoting Vista to unsuspecting saps.

Re:Anyone named Bruno instantly hired

[PenguSven]

That's why they're paid 20 bucks an hour!

Um.. are you under some delusion that $20/hr is a LOT?

This might backfire, too

[ghoti]

When people start to realize that these "gurus" won't help them with their problems, they will get more irritated than with the usual clueless Best Buy salesdrones. After all, what do you expect a guru to do? Answer questions!

So they will either have to figure out some kind of transition to make those gurus available for tech support (which of course means a lot more training), or end up doing more damage than good.

Re:This might backfire, too

[Firehed]

My thought exactly. Either Microsoft is more ass-backwards than I had previously thought, or they simply don't understand how to compete on the same plane. Apple has plenty of people walking the sales floor answering questions and doing actual sales work, but so does Best Buy. Aside from generally needing less support in the first place, part of that Apple Store Experience is seeing that help desk and seeing that there's a physical presence where you can get any problems solved (or at least assessed, when it comes to hardware repair and such).

The last thing that would make me buy Vista is more people pitching the damn thing to me. I don't hate it, but knowing that I could bring the machine in to have someone actually look at it and not have to fail at diagnosing it over the phone from India would be a HUGE selling point for most people. Not the geeks of Slashdot for the most part, but at least for the majority of those who have attempted to use phone support.

Customer service-oriented companies are destined to succeed when their competitors are only sales-oriented. Apple creates a positive experience* by trying to start you off well and ensure that you're taken care of if problems are encountered. This is rarely if ever the case with Microsoft and the hardware companies that bundle its software. They treat customer support as a cost of doing business rather than a value-add for customers, and it always shows. That may work once, but it sure as hell doesn't generate repeat customers, let alone all of the free word-of-mouth advertising that Apple gets these days.

*I've had plenty of issues with my MBP, but they've all been hardware-related except for one odd corrupted plist file that took them all of five minutes to fix, unlike all of the software problems on my Windows-based systems. They actually worked to fix the problems. Except for when I had a CD burner die in a Dell back in 2002 or so, I've never witnessed this with MS-based vendors as a consumer.

Re:This might backfire, too

[nine-times]

The last thing that would make me buy Vista is more people pitching the damn thing to me. I don't hate it, but knowing that I could bring the machine in to have someone actually look at it and not have to fail at diagnosing it over the phone from India would be a HUGE selling point for most people. Not the geeks of Slashdot for the most part, but at least for the majority of those who have attempted to use phone support.

Where you hit a bit of a problem, though, is that Microsoft is just providing the OEM software, and other people provide the hardware. Even if Microsoft wanted to provide tech support like this, what do they do when it's a hardware/driver problem?

So there's an advantage that Apple has by selling an integrated hardware/software platform. It allows them to provide a better experience and provide better support. At least in theory.

Think "backlash".

[khasim]

What happens when the customer comes back NEXT weekend and tries to get the "guru" that gave him the advice to buy the Vista box?

Okay, grab a different "guru". Why can't you answer my question? The other guy said that it WOULD work.

It's not going to take many episodes like that before this becomes a disaster for them.

Re:Some Questions To Ask

[jefu]

How do I get a refund if I refuse the Vista EULA on the computer and want to install something else?

Re:Anyone named Bruno instantly hired

[PitaBred]

In many areas of the country, it IS a lot for the type of job they're doing, especially since it almost certainly doesn't require a serious education. It's not exactly a "highly skilled" profession, it's just sales. A kid with a high-school diploma and some interest can do it.

These are company reps

[fermion]

Company representatives are nothing new or interesting. Many printer companies will pay a rep to hang around the printer department and encourage you to buy their brand of printer. This is not helping the customer as it may be that the printer might not be best the customer. These people are level below the commission sales staff, because at least such staff will try to get you the best match of what is in stock.

These pushers are why MS can't sell vista. They want to sell the product, they want to market it, but they won't support it. What Apple has is the personal touch. Chat icon on the help website. People at the stores you can talk to when you have problem. They support the product. Anyone can go in and talk to a rep for free, even on old product. MS does not support anyone without an additional charge.

Here is what would encourage people to buy vista and MS based computers in general. For about 100 million dollars they could put a help technician in every best buy store. Just a person sitting a desk. Wiling to help anyone who came in with a question. I bet Best Buy would donate facilities. Anytime someone had an issue with any MS Windows based computer, just come in a get some help. Make a reservation. Get the help in person. Do you think MS spent less than $100 million on the series of ad with Seinfeld, and those don't help anyone. The sales droid walking around lying to customers don't help anyone either. It realy seems like MS will spend money on anything other than helping the end user.

Re:Anyone named Bruno instantly hired

[RiotingPacifist]

with linux i find that support often takes a while (especially IRC) but aslong as im friendly ive only had 1 problem (some idiot insiting everything was flash's fault) hell yesterday i actually got help from the developer of my webcam driver. the key is not to pretend that linux owes you something.