Outside Innovation

What Can Damage Apple’s Amazing Customer Experience and Brand?

Apple has set the bar for customer experience in so many ways. Let’s begin to count them:

• Product/service design
• Product/service introduction
• Out-of-the-box experience
• Service (iTunes) experience
• User experience
• Brand experience seduction and advocacy
• Retail experience
• Customer service in the store
• Customer service on the phone
• Returns/replacements/exchanges

© 2010 Apple

Recently, I’ve been impressed by the number of stories I’ve head from Apple users about amazing customer service experiences around returns, exchanges, and upgrades with no questions asked—essentially exceeding customers’ expectations. I’ve also heard lots of great stories about Apple’s skill at setting (and exceeding) expectations for deliveries of scarce products.

I’ve also been noticing the difference between the Apple retail experience and magnetism and that of all other stores. For example, in downtown San Francisco, the two-story store is always packed, yet there’s ample room for several dogs to be lying on the floor near their owners, and nobody has to wait too long before they can get their hands on an iPad to try. And the checkout lines are expedited. In sleepy Ardmore, Pennsylvania—in a downtown area that was originally designed to serve rich Main Line women who had nothing to do all day except shop and lunch with their friends—all the department stores and boutiques are now virtually abandoned since that lifestyle was replaced by busy two (+)-career families. The chic shopping section of Ardmore is now a ghost town. But there are two vibrant retail establishments: Trader Joe’s and the Apple Store. You walk down a nearly empty sidewalk to the Apple Store, open the door, and feel like you’ve entered a different universe. It’s teaming with customers and activity. Your immediate thought is, “Buy Apple Stock!”

Pandora Mixes the Best of Taxonomy with the Wisdom of the Crowds

Smart Customization is hot! Mass-customized products and services, personalized experiences, smart recommendations that are tailored to your specific interests and needs—all of these efforts have a lot in common. 

On May 20th and 21st, I had the good fortune to attend the 2010 Smart Customization Seminar at the MIT Design Lab. One of the speakers I really enjoyed was Tom Conrad, the CTO of Pandora Internet Radio. Tom told the story of the history of Pandora, from its early days as Savage Beast, when the company provided music recommendation services to music retailers, through its reincarnation as Pandora Internet Radio in the summer of 2005. For over 10 years, the musicians and technologists at Pandora have been building and evolving a Music Genome by codifying over 800,000 pieces of music based on 400 musicological attributes. Their goal: make it easy to understand what sounds you like and find more music you'll like based on those attributes. His story is fascinating for anyone who wants to understand the trade-offs between the distinctions that subject matter experts make and the distinctions that average fans make. As is the case with many electronic publishing efforts, Pandora has merged the best of both worlds: a professional taxonomy with the wisdom of the crowds.

Grandma Shows National Instruments' Customers How Easy It Is!

Getting customers to adopt a new product is always a big challenge for any product marketing manager.   Chris Delvizis, the Data Acquisition Product Manager for National Instruments' new plug and play temperature sensor was so excited about the ease of adoption and use of his new NI USB-TC01 Thermocouple Measurement Device, he had his grandmother demo the installation and use of the product!

Of course you SHOULD be able to plug a new device into your PC and have it work out of the box, but that's often not the case with data acquisition devices such as sensors of various kinds. Usually, you have to download a driver, select the Operating System, and then connect the sensing device to the application you want to use to log and analyze the data. This new temperature sensor from NI is the first to use the NI InstantDAQ Technology that contains the driver within the device, but also includes the application for logging and viewing the data. And, you can download additional free applications and/or connect instantly to NI's LabVIEW development environment and online community of developers.

The concept for the InstantDAQ technology originated from two unlikely sources, Dave Wilson, International Marketing Director and Christer Ljungdahl Director of Web and Direct Marketing when they were looking to create a product that would be easy to sell online and to use without training.  Christer reported that their inspiration was the ease of use of other commercial products such as the FlipVideo camera which Cisco acquired in 2009.  As head of Web Marketing for National Instruments Christer is eager to have even more NI products that people can buy directly from the Web site, plug into a USB port on their PC, and use it productively within minutes of receiving and unpacking with not for a manual So, Christer and his colleague Dave designed a prototype.  Once the R&D and Product Marketing groups saw it they were bought in and immediately productized it leading to other innovations such as the InstantDAQ technology and a clever use of social media to promote the product -- which speaks volumes for the innovation-friendly culture of National Instruments.  It sells for $99 and can be purchased here.

Improve Your Ecosystem’s Ability to Tackle Complex Issues

Watching BP’s inability to stop the hemorrhaging of oil into the Gulf reminds us how difficult it is for any organization to predict, prevent, and to deal with complex problems. Yet the number of complex issues that are on our collective radar continues to increase. Has living in the world become more complex? Or do we perceive it that way because we have so much more information and communication?

We Have Urgent, Complex Issues to Address and Opportunities to Innovate

Complex issues abound. We need to cap an oil leak under tremendous pressure. We need to slow the rate of global climate change. We want to provide affordable wellness and healthcare to everyone. We want to be able to avoid, or at least moderate, the next global recession. In our businesses, we want to improve our organization’s ability to spot opportunities, take responsible actions, and reap rewards. We want to anticipate customers’ needs and deliver exceptional experiences that will turn them into happy and loyal fans.

We Need to Accelerate Our Abilities to Innovate—as Individuals, Organizations, and Ecosystems

There’s a real thirst for tools and approaches that will accelerate our ability as groups of people to tackle these (and many other) complex issues. Every business executive I interview talks about the need for more flexibility to be able spot opportunities and to move quickly. These executives seem genuinely puzzled by how easy it is to sense and detect patterns, yet how hard it seems to be to take actions in the physical world that won’t backfire in some way or where the time delay from conception to execution is just too long. People in many industries want to accelerate their abilities to solve complex problems, to seize opportunities, to innovate, and to reap rewards.