Looking out the window on a Saturday night, some of the vacant office spaces are impossible to miss. The reason is simple: they’ve got all their lights on, brightly illuminating the raw floor that lacks furniture or even carpeting. Meanwhile, all the occupied floors are dark, aside from a few exit signs and other emergency lights.

I don’t know who’s responsible for turning off the lights in these vacant offices, but it’s just shameful that they’re being left on 24/7. Maybe it’s a lazy realtor or a careless building manager. Either way, they’re wasting an enormous amount of power, and making the place look bad by effectively shining a spotlight on the unwanted space.

Whether you’re dealing with commercial or residential property, and whether it’s for sale or lease, the sensible approach is to turn the lights off when nobody is touring the premises. Sure, you can leave on some perimeter or exterior lighting for security purposes. But illuminating every inch of a vacant area is a total waste from a business and environmental perspective, and it serves nobody’s interests to keep all those lights running day and night.

Ikea doesn’t advertise that much in Chicago, at least not on the billboards and other out-of-home canvases that I see in the city. Maybe they assume that they already have the market cornered, and any interested customers will seek them out anyway. Or perhaps it’s because despite having two Ikea stores in the so-called Chicagoland area, you can’t get to either one via CTA or Metra trains.

Remembering my own experience going to Ikea several years ago, it was a nightmare: first a long train ride, then a bus, and then a ridiculous mall trolley. Round trip including shopping, it was like a 12 hour endeavor — and that’s after I gave up and took a cab part of the way back. Clearly, Ikea expects its customers to own or rent a car in order to shop there.

I wonder how many customers a store like Ikea loses when it’s not accessible at all via mass transit, especially in cities like Chicago, New York and San Francisco where many residents don’t own a car. (I can’t speak from direct experience in those other places, but I’m guessing there’s no train to Ikea there, either.) At a minimum, I’m guessing that the customers who do make it to the store end up shopping there less frequently, and spending less money, than they would if the store was conveniently accessible by train.

With mass transit systems always in search of more funding, there’s a natural opportunity here. Big, well-funded retailers like Ikea could strike a deal to extend the existing rail lines directly to their stores. Or, several big retailers in a given area could team up to lobby for the rail extension, and help share the costs. Sure, this would be expensive and have a long timeline to completion. But it’s not like building a megastore is fast or cheap in the first place, and these companies manage to pull that off just fine.

Thinking about the amount of customers that Ikea and other destination stores would bring in with a direct train route, I have to believe they’d make a ton of additional revenue and profits from this type of investment. Believe it or not, carless people need furniture, too.

This week, I spent several days working on revisions to a contract with a potential vendor. We actually negotiated all the major items (like the costs and timeline) before starting on the contract, and it was the vendor’s job to send me a contract draft reflecting those agreed-upon points. Well, the document I received was sloppy at best, and it took me an entire day just to compare the contract to the signed proposal and insert what they left out. Getting the rest of the document into a sensible form took several days more.

This is a poor way to do business. If the vendor didn’t have the time or inclination to make the necessary edits prior to sending over the contract, they should have either told me they needed more time to do it right, or sent me an unmodified draft and asked that I take care of all the changes. Instead, I was presented with a work-in-progress that I had to decipher like a puzzle.

There’s nothing wrong with asking the other party to do their fair share of the work. But if you decide to take on the responsibility of making changes to a contract based on a series of prior discussions, be sure that you follow through and actually send over a fully-updated document. If you instead do the bare minimum and leave a bunch of things unfinished, you’ll end up looking sloppy and careless, which reduces the other party’s perceptions of you and ultimately hurts your negotiating position.

I’ve seen plenty of pictures of excess packaging posted all across the Internet. From huge boxes containing a tiny item to multiple boxes nested like Russian dolls, documenting unnecessary packing material nearly qualifies as a competitive sport. With this in mind, I was amused to receive a package from Target that took the opposite approach.

In short, they sent two modest-sized items in a plastic pouch that was clearly meant for much smaller, more flexible things. The end of the pouch was already partially open when I received the shipment, but luckily nothing was damaged.

While I appreciate Target’s efforts to save on packaging and buck the overkill trend, a word of caution is probably in order. If everyone else is veering too far to one side of a continuum, there’s nothing wrong with choosing the opposite approach. But be sure to land somewhere in the sweet spot, instead of flying right past it. In my case, that means using a smaller package that’s still big enough to hold the products, rather than choosing a shipping container that barely fits its contents.

Let’s say that I’m recording something on my Tivo. I check out the program and decide I don’t want it. So, I stop watching that program before it’s over, and I tell the Tivo to stop recording the program. Will I be keeping that recording for later? Doubtful, since I manually cancelled the process. So why doesn’t the Tivo automatically ask if I’d like to delete the partial recording? This little bit of extra logic would eliminate the need to return to the Now Playing list to find and delete the unwanted show.

The issue with user-created leftovers isn’t limited to Tivo. For instance, you get the same situation if you’re downloading a big file in your web browser, and decide to cancel it before it’s done. The partial download probably isn’t very useful, so the chances are quite good that the user will end up deleting it after they press cancel. What’s the takeaway here? In short, if a customer’s behavior indicates they want to cancel or abandon a process that hasn’t been completed yet, you can save them time and effort by offering to automatically remove the leftover files.

When you make a purchase in a retail store using a credit or debit card, one of the first things you see on the screen (or get asked by the cashier) is quite predictable: “credit or debit?” For Visa and MasterCard, this makes sense: those brands issue both types of cards. But what about the card brands that only deal with credit cards, like Amex? Isn’t it a huge waste of time to ask Amex customers to select the card type, when the answer is always the same?

It seems like this logic should be programmed into the credit card terminals and POS systems. After all, the data is already there. The first few digits of the card number tell you which card brand you’re dealing with. Based on this, just do a quick lookup to see if that card brand issues credit and debit, or just credit cards. If the brand doesn’t issue debit cards, then there’s no reason to ask the customer a further question about it.

Am I nit picking on this? From a consumer perspective, sure. But from the retailer’s perspective, shaving a few seconds off each transaction adds up to big money when multiplied across a large number of purchases. By eliminating the credit or debit question from even 10% of transactions, the savings should be substantial.

I recently listened to an interview with one of the product managers at Facebook. During the interview, they briefly touched on the issues that Facebook has experienced whenever they’ve changed the interface or modified the privacy settings. One statement from the Facebook rep really caught my attention, though. While talking about past updates, she said something like this: “People get really upset when you change how privacy settings work.” While the statement is probably quite accurate, the phrasing leaves something to be desired.

In short, when you say that “people” feel a certain way, it distances you from your customer base. “People” by itself creates an us versus them mentality, as if you’re not part of the group and can’t empathize with them. The solution is easy: add the word “our” to the mix. For instance, you could say “our customers” or “our users” are very concerned about privacy. This creates a sense of shared community and shared values between the person talking and the group they’re addressing. Try referring to customers and users this way, and I bet you’ll find it easier to see things from their perspective, too.

When interacting with customers and prospects, it’s important to choose the right tone. For example, consider the following ways of closing out a sales conversation:

– “We’ll do anything possible to win this deal — even give you the product for free!”
– “We’re really busy with new orders, so I’m not going to waste a bunch of time trying to convince you to buy.”
– “We value your business and would be happy to have you as a customer.”

I’ve heard variations on all of these. In general, the first approach makes you seem desperate, the second one conveys that you don’t need the business, and the third strikes a good compromise between the two extremes. And when you think about it, this compromise makes sense from the buyer’s perspective. We all want to do business with companies who are motivated and passionate about their products. At the same time, we’re trained to put up a mental red flag when we encounter people who act desperate and pushy, or those who seem listless and unmotivated when it comes to the potential for new business.

Let’s say I’m shopping for shoes. I start by choosing Men’s Shoes, and then click additional filters for the desired Brand, Color, Size, and so on. I don’t find what I’m looking for, so I go back to the homepage and start again. But even on e-commerce sites that are renowned for their smart interface design, chances are that I have to set every one of those filters again.

This doesn’t make any sense. Sure, I might be interested in looking at different brands and styles on each subsequent search. But if I started with men’s shoes and also specified a certain size, those choices aren’t going to change. The website could save me time and increase conversion rates by making those filters persistent for my entire visit, or even storing them for say 48 hours after the first search. If I decide to change the shoe size, for instance, I could always remove the filter with a click of the mouse. But forcing me to choose the same size over and over again eats up time that I could be spending actually deciding what to buy.

Need a good way to determine which filters should receive the sticky treatment, versus those that should revert to the defaults on every search? Just look at the paths that your paying customers take prior to making a purchase. Analyze how they use your filters and search fields. If they tend to choose the same values for certain attributes even as they change other ones, that’s a good sign that you should make that first set of filters persistent for the length of the visit.

When I see a DVD in my Netflix queue that’s listed as “Very Long Wait”, I know that I’ll need to be patient. Very, very patient. Heck, I think I waited three months to get the “Caprica” pilot, making me wonder if they only bought one copy and made all the BSG fans stand in line for it. Anyways, I think Netflix should inject some levity into the whole waiting thing, and be a little more honest about what “Very Long Wait” really means. For instance:

– “It’s gonna be a while”
– “Might we suggest another DVD?”
– “Don’t get your hopes up”
– “Maybe you should read a book”
– “Apparently, it’s worth the wait”

Would this type of messaging call even more attention to what’s already a weak point in the service? Yeah, probably. But it’s not like Netflix is doing themselves any favors with the boring status messages that they use today.