Best Buy’s Geek Squad is expanding its services to assist customers beyond the average Joe’s personal computer problems. The Geek Squad service is working with a variety of providers to assist SMBs, small and medium sized businesses, for their computing needs including their telecommunication services. Best Buy launched their channel program, known as Geek Squad’s Partner Program, earlier this year in March to recruit telecommunication and cable resellers to help provide their SMB clients with maintenance and service repair solutions.
Since the launch of Geek Squad’s Partner Program, the company has reached out to and began working with nearly a dozen solutions providers including major networking and communications, VARs (value added resellers), integrators, and two VoIP providers. Via CRN, Best Buy confirmed VoIP.com and PhonePower as the two VoIP providers which offer “Geek Squad PC, mobile, networking and infrastructure support services, including diagnostics, repair and network integration for products such as network devices, firewalls, VPN, servers and data backup tools.”
Geek Squad has a reported 20,000 service agents throughout the company’s thousand-plus stores nationwide. The services offered by the Geek Squad are not just varied and expansive but thanks to the company’s sheer amount of stores, are reachable throughout the country. The services are also customizable and designed to fulfill a need to change support capabilities in the form of packages that vary in scope, scale and price.
Geek Squad’s partner program is similar to the standard ones offering by telecom agents – solutions providers get a commission for a business referral and then receive a residual commission that spans the lifetime of the customer’s chosen contract with Geek Squad.
The Geek Squad’s Partner Program’s manager, Al Afflitto, had this to say via CRN, “We see situations all the time where routers and phones are drop-shipped, and while they’re supposed to be turnkey, they’re just not as plug-and-play as a lot of these users would like. So the VoIP play for [the channel] is that they sell to the small business of one to 20 users, and Geek Squad is the tech support. And, oh, by the way, we can service the printers and scanners, tablets, smartphones and other devices in that office.”
CRN reports that more partnerships are slated to be announced within the coming months. For more information on the Partner Program visit their website.
