Innovation Tyrant: Retail customer service and innovation

Showing posts with label Retail customer service and innovation. Show all posts

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Touch-enabled wall paint converts skin contact into electronics control

On/Off paint is a conductive wall treatment that enables touch control of various home electronic devices.

19th March 2012 in Life Hacks, Style & Design.

Now that we’ve seen whispering windows, motion-sensing walls and device-charging furniture, it doesn’t seem surprising to come across touch-enabled wall paint for the home. Sure enough, Nicolas Triboulot, Laurent Grapin and Thibault Thomas of Quark Design have come up with On/Off paint, a conductive wall treatment that can enable touch control of various home electronic devices.

On/Off paint is grayish in color and is designed to serve as an undercoat on virtually any medium beneath traditional paints or wallpapers. Once applied, it enables touch-based control of electronic devices such as lamps or alarms. Including both paint and a hidden electronic device, the On/Off system is expected to hit the market this year, according to a report on e-lab, while Futura-Sciences reports that prices will be between 30 and 40 euros per liter.

On/Off paint could potentially remove the need for light switches around the home, controlling virtually any kind of electronic device and even acting as a dimmer switch when users touch with different pressures. Tech-savvy entrepreneurs: one to get involved in?

via springwise.com

Speaking

As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth.

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How To Win Over Difficult or Combative Customers

Eventually, all small business owners are faced with a customer who’s ready for conversational battle. Sometimes there is good reason for these combative conversations; sometimes there isn’t. Either way, when faced with this situation, you might get the urge to fight back. Or you might try to submit or adhere to every demand of the other person. Neither of these options is a good idea. Instead, the best way to extinguish a fiery conversation is to be assertive. To do this you need to listen up, pace yourself, and then take the lead.

Listen up. In a poker game, the player who bets last has a big advantage because he or she gets to hear the other bets first. Using the extra information, he or she can make better decisions. This principle is the same for conversations, especially difficult ones. Always let difficult customers speak first so you can use what they tell you to craft the right response.

Pace yourself. Mirror the customer’s body language, tone of voice, and talking speed. This is known as pacing. Don’t duplicate the behavior, but strive to create similarities. Take into consideration gestures, posture, hand positioning, and rhythm of speech. If mirrored smoothly, it will create an instant connection. If applicable, use a phrase such as: "If I were you, I would feel the same way."

Take the lead. Once you have established a rapport, you can start to move the conversation where you want it to go. Slowly bring your tone, body language, and breathing into a calmer, more relaxed condition and the customer will follow. Lead customers out of their current emotional state by putting their feelings in the past with statements such as: "So you were mad when …."

Always strive to achieve a state of cooperation in the customer relationship. No matter how difficult a customer is being, you have been approached because he or she believes you can help. By using the listening, pacing, and leading method, you can bring the customer to a position where solutions are much more easily realized. via businessweek.com

Speaking

Thursday, March 29, 2012

It Could Happen Anywhere: Best Buy's Amazonian Nightmare

Where did you buy that snazzy Zenith 19″ or VCR however many years ago? Circuit City? Crazy Eddie? Nobody Beats the Whiz? Service Merchandise? Incredible Universe? The list of departed—dearly or otherwise—big boxes that once dominated the consumer electronics landscape is endless. (Not to mention the mass extinction of regional players such as Lechmere, Tweeter, Sound Advice, and Kaufman & Roberts.) So you’d think the last man standing in the field, Best Buy, the world’s top electronics retailer, would be living large right about now. Instead, with its stock at a multiyear low, the Richfield (Minn.) retailer today announced it will be shutting 50 of its 1,100 stores amid a revenue shortfall. Management promised to scale back on discounts, effectively ceding low-margin sales to rivals. Best Buy also says it plans to slash $800 million in costs over the next three years.

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Best Buy’s moves show how even those traditional merchants that have managed to trump their brick-and-mortar rivals can’t automatically count on picking up their former customers. Channeling Johnny Cochran, Gimme Credit analyst Carol Levenson explains: “If you don’t perform, you must transform. … No amount of adjustments or restatements can obscure the fact that the company returned to negative comparable-store sales in the fourth quarter … and posted a second straight year of comparable-store sales declines.” All this, she says, despite the fact that ”Best Buy was handed a gift when Circuit City left the building.”

One retailing shift that’s likely at work here is a phenomenon known as “showrooming,” in which window shoppers go to one of Best Buy’s well-appointed stores to avail themselves of quality face time with gadgets and salespeople (think inventory and salary costs) before consummating the transaction elsewhere—online. Most often, they do that through Amazon.com, where shipping is frequently free and, depending on your state, sales tax does not apply. Fueling that growing practice are price-comparison apps such as Amazon’s Price Check, which lets those obnoxiously savvy smartphone users scan a particular item’s barcode at a store and immediately know who has the best deal on the Web. Consumers can then just buy it right on their phone. It’s like a scene from the vintage cartoon comedy The Jetsons, but traditional retailers with hundreds of costly stores, such as Best Buy, Sears Holdings, and even Wal-Mart, aren’t laughing.

Data: Compiled by Bloomberg

via businessweek.com

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective hypercompetition strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter.