One of the few downsides to living in downtown Chicago is the long trek required to get to stores like Target or Wal-Mart. Granted, Target has a store just south of downtown, right by a major train station. It’s only a five minute walk from the train to the store, which makes it fairly easy to get to. So far, so good.

The problem arises after you leave the store. Even if you have a foldable cart to hold your bags, you still have to navigate the cart back to the train station, up the stairs, onto the train, off the train, and back home. As a result, there’s only so much you can carry at once, and the hassle means that I only go to Target when I really need to. Most of the time, I order stuff online or pay higher prices to shop closer to home. This trend can’t be good for Target, since it causes people to buy fewer things, return less frequently, and generally contribute less revenue to the store.

Since the real problem is getting items home, and Target doesn’t sell the same things online, I propose a few solutions. One option is to offer a home delivery service at the store level. You buy your items, drop them off when you leave, and they bring them to your house (within a very limited area) for a small fee, say $10. But this requires a post-sale storage and logistics operation at the store. So I like my second idea better: run a shuttle from the store to high-density downtown areas, perhaps every 30 minutes. To offset the cost, customers would buy a $5 ride card at checkout, or perhaps this could be waived for purchases over a certain amount. Depending on the actual usage, this shuttle could also be used to take people to the store, only operate during popular shopping hours, etc.

I think the customer shuttle approach would be an asset to any retailer that has stores on the outskirts of a major downtown area. And the benefits wouldn’t just be limited to increased purchase size and frequency. Once the word gets out, the added convenience should attract entirely new customers, as well.

Once in a while, I get a phone call from a customer or partner company asking why I haven’t replied to their requests. They go on to explain how they’ve sent two or three messages about the same issue, and they ask why I’m ignoring them. So I check my sent messages or the CRM system and tell them the date and time of each response. I offer to re-send the info again, which usually makes it to their inbox without any problem. But even after I suggest that perhaps their email system was having problems on the dates of my original replies, they still treat this like a failure on my end.

Granted, there are lots of ways that emails and other correspondence can get stuck before they reach the recipient. That sort of thing is way beyond the scope of this article. Rather, I’d like to point out that customers and others who submit a request have a responsibility to tell the other party when they haven’t heard back in a reasonable timeframe. Not weeks or even months later (which I’ve seen a number of times), but right after the usual turnaround time has elapsed. Do you normally hear back from a vendor’s tech support in 1-2 days? Then giving them a call or shooting them another email after 3-4 days is probably a good idea. If you let it stew for too long, everyone just gets frustrated.

Along the same lines, we all need to realize that if we haven’t gotten a response from an organization that is typically quite prompt, then the issue might be on our side of things. Step back and ask yourself if you’ve noticed that other people’s response times are much slower than normal, or you’re not hearing back from people at all. Did the issue begin around a certain date? Take this info and report it to your IT person or service provider. And even more importantly, follow through to make sure it’s corrected for good. Otherwise, you might continue placing blame on entirely the wrong set of people.

Whenever I receive a package or a letter, the first thing I do is throw away the junk. You know, those mini-catalogs, special offers, and other things that someone pays to include with credit card bills, Amazon.com shipments, and other legitimate mailings. This phenomenon got me thinking: could businesses provide a way for customers to opt-out of these piggyback mailings or eliminate them altogether, and would the increased customer satisfaction make up for the lost revenues?

The benefit of offering an opt-out preference or just getting rid of the mailings is straightforward. Customers would save the time they otherwise spend discarding these items, and much less waste would end up in landfills (since I’m sure not everyone recycles the mailings). Taking this a step further, the company offering such an option (“Don’t include special offers or catalogs with my shipment”, etc.) would be perceived as more trustworthy, and kinder to the environment. In today’s green-friendly marketing climate, the latter fact alone could be hugely beneficial in PR and advertising campaigns.

On the other hand, marketers are clearly paying something to get their brochures included in otherwise unrelated mailings. As to how much this might add up to for someone like Amazon.com, I really have no idea. But it’s definitely a significant number. Here’s an interesting idea: start by calculating the average amount of revenue generated per package. Then approach the existing advertisers (or new ones) and let them become “green package” sponsors by printing a shorter version of their offers on the outside of the box or envelope itself, or on the packing slip. All the junk that used to go in the package is eliminated, either for all customers or just those that choose this option. Under this model, revenues stay the same (or even increase), customers are happier because they save time, and the vendor looks like a hero for protecting the environment.