Outside Innovation

Staples Misses an Opportunity to Retain Customers

One of the ways I tell that the jobless rate in an area has increased is by looking at the Staples parking lot. People without jobs often set up or improve their home offices—either to help them look for jobs and/or to build their own small business. It makes you feel better. It puts you in control of your destiny. And there are lots of helpful, upbeat Staples associates who will lend a helping hand.

We've been fans of a lot of things that Staples has done right. Its stores are well-marked and easy to navigate. Its main web site is also easy to use and has some "firsts" for office supply stores, like customers' ratings and reviews. (Who would have thought that these mattered for office supplies? But they do!) And Staples’ world-class re-invention of rebates — EasyRebates — was one of the case studies in Outside Innovation.

But we've discovered one area in which Staples (and many other businesses) could do a much better job. It's an investment that would pay off big time in customer loyalty as measured by actual repeat business. Staples needs to make it easier for its customers to "manage their stuff." In particular, Staples should make it easy for people to categorize their purchases by project or client. They should let you track the purchases of multiple people on a single, linked account. Staples should make it much easier to get a picture of everything you've spent in a given time period, and to sort and organize it. They should make it easier to repurchase something from a previous order. And they should make it easier to replenish things you purchase frequently. These all seem like missed opportunities for Staples (and for any company catering to business customers).

For more insight about what Staples does well and not and where you might improve the experience for your business customers, read Ronni Marshak’s Customer Experience Audit.

How How Well Does Staples Help a Small Company “Manage My Stuff?”
Customer Experience Audit of Staple’s Capabilities to Let Small B2B Customers Manage Their Relationship
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, July 21, 2011

Innovation Psychology: Tips for Breaking from the Norm

We welcome guest columnist, Jim Oliver, who provides tips on how to encourage innovative thinking.

Two psychological concepts, which describe human nature’s tendency to conform to the known, provide interesting insights into the innovation process. While these traits may serve us well in most of our daily life, it is important to circumvent them when our natural instincts fail to serve our reality.

Avoiding Conformity

In a series of well-known studies published in the 1950s, Solomon Asch demonstrated that people often agree with an opinion shared by a group, even when evidence clearly shows that the opinion is false. In his experiments, he asked subjects to pick the longest of three black lines on a piece of paper. In each experiment, a shocking number of subjects picked the line that was obviously the shortest, simply because the majority of people around them (in reality, Asch’s co-conspirators) had picked it as the longest.

Because outside-the-box ideas are at the core of innovation, Asch’s studies teach an important lesson. To avoid the conformity he uncovered, it’s crucial to create an environment in which people feel comfortable sharing ideas without fear of social disapproval.

Tip: Encouraging out-of-the box thinking can be accomplished by clearly establishing a creative comfort zone in which it’s made explicitly clear that there are no bad ideas. Additionally, including a person in a brainstorming group who is naturally comfortable sharing their original ideas can help set the tone for fearless idea sharing among everyone in the group.

Anchoring and Adjustment

Another related concept is known as ‘anchoring and adjustment.’ The idea is that people base their decisions and judgment on what is already known. For example, consider the following questions:

• Is the population of Chicago greater or less than 200,000? What is the exact population?

• Is the population of Chicago greater or less than 900,000? What is the exact population?
  

Studies have shown that when asked similar questions, people asked the first question will estimate the exact population to be much lower than those asked the second. The given number acts as an anchor around which people base their answer.

So, how does this impact innovation? The best answer is a famous Henry Ford quote: “If I had asked consumers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” To innovate, it’s important to think of solutions that aren’t based on what already exists.

Tip: Seeking inspiration in seemingly unrelated areas can help to move thinking beyond what’s known into innovative ideas.

Transcending Our Nature

While the desire for group acceptance and the anchoring and adjustment method of problem solving are part of our psychological makeup, both put limits on creativity. Being aware of these natural tendencies is the first step toward transcending them. Spending time developing ways around these potential limiters can help to foster an environment ripe for innovative thinking.

~ Jim Oliver

Author Bio: Jim Oliver works for Cloverleaf Innovation, a Chicago branding agency. In his off time he enjoys running marathons and spending time with his wife, Patricia, and their three children.

How to Keep Things Secure in Your Dropbox or Other Cloud Storage

By Scott Jordan, Patty’s Pioneer

Thanks to Scott Jordan for this invaluable cloud storage tip (for Mac OS X users). You can find Scott’s tips and other users’ comments on his blog, Unvexed.blogspot.com, including tips for non-Mac users.

I'm a huge fan of Dropbox and other cloud services. It's just incredibly convenient to be able to access my stuff from all my machines.

But security and privacy remain problematic: If your stuff is stored on someone else's machine, who else can access it? The question has been in the news lately. Expect more such stories as adoption of cloud technologies accelerates.

Yet by far the largest risk to your data is loss from hardware failure, theft, or physical disaster. Aside from the convenience factor, storing things in your Dropbox means it's locally copied to all your machines as well as safely backed-up (and versioned!) in the cloud. For those reasons, I keep all my current work in my Dropbox. Securely!

Here's How:
I use Macs most often lately, and this tip leverages some truly keen capabilities of OS X. (I am unaware if Windows 7 offers similar functionality combined with similar ease and baked-in speed, but there are third-party tools like TrueCrypt which can attempt something kinda/sorta parallel, but not as easy or automagical, and not as swift in execution.)

Why Is There Steady Migration to the Cloud Despite Reliability and Security Concerns?

Over the past few months, there have been a number of notable service quality incidents and security breaches of online services, including Sony’s PlayStation network, Amazon’s cloud service, Dropbox’s storage in the cloud, and countless others. The bar talk around “cloud” computing and online services would have you think that businesses and consumers are shying away from using hosted services, using Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, from storing their data “in the cloud,” or from migrating some or all of their computing infrastructure to virtual machines hosted by cloud service providers. However, there’s actually an uptick in the uptake of cloud computing in all of its various incarnations.

We (consumers and businesses) are using “cloud” services for all of the following kinds of activities:

1. Accessing and downloading media.

2. Accessing and downloading mobile apps.

3. Accessing and running business applications (CRM, hiring, ecommerce, logistics, provisioning, etc.).

4. Collaborating with colleagues, clients, and customers (project management, online communities, email, meeting scheduling).

5. Analyzing large amounts of data.

6. Storing large amounts of data (much of it unstructured, like video, images, text files, etc.).

7. Developing and testing new applications and online services.

Apple’s iCloud: Misunderstood and Underrated

Apple’s iCloud service won’t formally debut until the Fall of 2011, yet it has attracted many criticisms. We think that Apple’s iCloud actually raises the customer experience bar, yet again. With iCloud, Apple is redefining the experience of mobile offline and online computing by automagically synching and backing up all of your applications, files, and preferences across devices. If you lose your phone or your computer dies, you’ll be able to restore everything to exactly the way it was before. If you take a picture on one device, it will magically appear in your photo library on all your other devices. If you are working on a document or a spreadsheet on your iPad, it will magically appear with your cursor in the same spot on your MacBook. And, if you don’t have connectivity, you can keep on working, using your applications, and enjoying your music, etc. until you’re able to re-synch.

Apple uses its “cloud” service with tight integration into its operating systems to deliver this seamless peripatetic computing experience. Application developers who want their applications to conform to that experience will need to write to a new set of application programming interfaces (APIs). If developers want their applications to behave consistently across other operating system platforms and ecosystems (e.g., Windows, RIM, Android, and so on), they’ll need to do more work in order to provide an equivalent cross-platform seamless experience.

Today, there are a number of applications that work really well across platforms (RIM Blackberry, iPad, Mac, PC, Android, etc.), such as Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader, Evernote for capturing, tagging, and annotating information, and, of course, almost all Web-based apps, like Facebook, Gmail, Google apps, and so on. They all manage to deliver good synchronization across mobile apps and across platforms.

The gauntlet that Apple is throwing down with its seamless online/offline/mobile experience brought to you via iCloud is to provide a single environment that keeps all your applications, data, and preferences synched up. That’s going to be a tough act to follow.

 Why Apple's iCloud Service Will Be Successful
iCloud Service Provides Much-Needed Seamless Synchronization of Digital Media and Applications
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, June 30, 2011