Best Buy Intros Twelpforce

Best Buy has announced a new service called Twelpforce that allows prospective customers to ask Best Buy employees from across all operations any question about products, technology problems and service issues, by using the popular microblogging site, Twitter.

"If you have a question about an electronics product - no matter where you bought it, no matter where you are and even if you haven't bought it yet - Best Buy is here to help," said Barry Judge, chief marketing officer for Best Buy.

"We've long believed that it is Best Buy's employees who make us unique, and their knowledge provides the greatest value customers receive in shopping at Best Buy. This unique extension lets them share their passions and abilities outside of the store or in-home interaction to bring true support to those in need anywhere."

Officials said that Twelpforce is a merged and concocted modern day word that is derived from the first two letters of twitter, the last two letters of the word help as well as the full word force, which indicates the staff resources at Best Buy who are ready to answer queries and are from Best Buy’s different business streams such as Blue Shirts and Geek Squad.

There are currently 700 staff logged on to Twelpforce with more are joining by the day, the company said.

Since twelpforce works on a social network platform, other Twitter users may choose to follow different Best buy related queries and conversations, thereby widening Best Buy’s all round visibility.

The company said that all inquiries and conversations, or ‘tweets’, will be preserved for anytime, anywhere, anyone reference under the @twelpforce feed and will be tagged by the name of respondent employee. Considering the number of technicians available at Best Buy, the company is confident that every single problem will be addressed.

"The best part of working for Best Buy is the thrill I get when I help customers get exactly what they're looking for," said Coral, an employee at Best Buy, whose Twelpforce id is @Coral_BestBuy. "By taking this to Twitter, we'll be able to take a little bit of the frustration out of people's lives, whether or not they're Best Buy customers. It's a great way to harness the collective knowledge of Best Buy's human capital."

Other popular Twitter driven new words and phrases, or ‘Twitterverse’, that are defining communication styles in the ‘Twittersphere’ are: Twetiquette - a term that indicates appropriate behavior when using Twitter; Twitpoll - noun, indicating a survey or question posed on Twitter, often for research and sometimes just for fun; Tweetdeck - noun, indicating one of the most popular desktop interfaces for Twitter; Twhirl - noun, indicating a smaller, less intrusive desktop interface for Twitter; Tweetup - noun, indicating a meeting organized on Twitter; and, Twestival - noun, indicating a charity event organized using Twitter.