Office Depot Sharpens Customer Focus Without Being Too Blunt About It

When it comes to getting office supplies, there are plenty of choices for paper, print cartridges, highlighters, whiteboard, and hand sanitizers (Staples, Walmart, your local department store). And there are plenty you don’t have to go anywhere for (Amazon and other e-tailers).

So Office Depot needs to differentiate itself to complete, and it's starting with decluttered stores and improving customer service. After testing their battle plan in two stores, it's now rolling out to 1,132 stores nationwide, according to AdAge.com.

Office Depot discovered more than year ago that its customers were having “difficulty finding everything they needed and lacked a clear understanding of the breadth of products available,” Ad Age reports. So the store has moved its most popular products to more accessible spots, more directional signage was added, and extraneous words were eliminated from the signage that already existed.

"It's been an amazing transformation to the store experience," said Bob Moore, chief marketing officer for Office Depot, to Ad Age. "We're helping customers find what's new, exciting, different and can make their lives easier. We're helping them save time."

Part of the more customer-centric focus involves training employees to ask open-ended questions , such as "What brings you to Office Depot today?" rather than “yes/no” questions.

"We had them doing a lot of tasks in terms of store operations that took them away from our customers," Moore stated. "We really empowered them to engage our customers and to have the time to help them through the shopping experience."

To drive home that message, Office Depot is rolling out a national cross-media advertising campaign, called “It’s Depot Time,” which notes the changes to consumers and business customers (with a hand from NASCAR star Tony Stewart, who has an endorsement deal with the brand) without stating outright that it’s any different from the past.

It's a marketing challenge — to promote that you're more customer-centric implies that you weren't before — although it doesn't hurt to remind customers that your staffers care, either.