By MATTHEW HOLT

After 3 days at the Health 2.0 conference, everyone is agreed with Jane Sarasohn-Kahn that more consumer choice and better transparency and an “Amazon like shopping experience” would improve health care. In fact in her wonderful book, HealthConsuming, Jane talks a lot about the dark side of putting this much pressure on consumers, but I just had an experience that revealed what might go wrong. Bear with me, this does get back to health care…

The short answer is that BestBuy‘s home appliance service delivery and fulfillment seriously sucks. It has gone off the rails in a massively bad way. You’d think they’d have a multi-platform CRM that worked but it’s a disaster

The story. The washer in an apartment I used to live in but now rent out broke after 9 years–fair enough. And I spent a long time on a customer IM chat with Best Buy figuring out if there was an available washer that would stack under the still working dryer (which was stacked on top of it). But the answer was no.

So in the same IM chat the Best Buy agent suggests a replacement washer and dryer, and all the stuff required to put it in, and added installation and delivery. And he gets me a page where I can fill in my details, credit card and buy it all, then return to the chat to set a delivery date. Pretty snazzy BUT apparently the agent forgot to add removing the old ones to the order (even though most of the conversation was about the old ones!) Remember that for later…