To experience the Zappos ability to deliver surprise, go to zappified.com/flip or direct your mobile QR reader at the image given here.
It doesn’t seem like such a big deal, does it? Zappos consistently provides service that is easy and accurate, it helps customers make informed choices, and it gives consumers generous and painless returns. Then again, take a moment to think about how many companies actually execute that complete service package.
I’ll even assume your business is like Zappos and you currently demonstrate all the service behaviors outlined in Chapter 4. In that case, you’re looking to take your service up a level. So what’s next? According to international studies like those done by Convergys, when a company masters ease and accuracy, its customers are looking for expedited service, knowledgeable staff, and other aspects of the experience that add value. Interestingly enough, many research studies show that personalized service (which occurs when service is modified to meet the specific needs of a customer or when an emotional connection is forged with a specific customer) is a long way down on customers’ wish lists. Given this hierarchy of customer wants, I will reserve the Zappos approach for creating personalized care for Principle 3, “Step into the Personal.” For now, we will look at what Zappos does to add value through service, including
1. Emphasizing velocity
2. Increasing staff members’ knowledge of products and service delivery
3. Elevating service recovery
4. Delivering surprise beyond the predicted and normative
To set the tone for several of the topics covered in this chapter, Alfred Lin, former COO and CEO at Zappos, notes, “In 1999, when the company started, we didn’t have the notion of customer service that we have today. Our service improvements were the result of very small incremental changes, whether they were to our return policy or the speed of our shipping processes. Often the difference between okay service and great service is a matter of executing on the basics and offering a slight extra that makes the customer go ‘wow.’ From our point of view, the cost difference between a ‘wow experience’ and an average experience is not much, while the benefit to the customer is huge.” Similarly, Alfred adds, “We were fortunate to understand that, from a customer’s perspective, loyalty is less about delivering to your word and more about what you do when you don’t deliver. It’s what we do that 0.1 to 1 percent of the time when we screw up that really matters.” Few leaders fully understand the tremendous opportunity employee knowledge, operational excellence, and swift service recovery offer for enhancing customer loyalty. Let’s zip toward some of the service wows that begin with rapid execution.
It’s been said that most of us have about as much time as we have money, and often we have too little of both. In a world where my children stand at a microwave exhorting, “Come on, come on; I don’t have all minute,” it’s clear that consumers have become accustomed to instant everything. Many sectors of our economy are the direct result of service speed innovations. Whether it’s quick service restaurants driven by companies like McDonald’s, where orders are to be completed in two minutes or less, airport ticket kiosks, ATM machines, or drive-through liquor stores, speed is an important service proposition for most businesses. The ultimate challenge of all this “need for speed” is the ability to manage both the quickness of service and the effect of that quickness on overall service quality. Service that is executed too rapidly can be fraught with errors and may lead to customers feeling rushed.
As an alternative to the word speed, I suggest the term service velocity. As you may recall from physics class, “velocity” is the measurement of the rate and direction of change in an object’s position. So when I refer to service velocity, I am talking about service speed coupled with an accurate and well-positioned customer experience. By that definition, Zappos has resoundingly mastered pinpoint service velocity.
At the time of Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos, Jason Busch of Spend Matters talked about the core delivery competencies of both companies by noting, “Zappos customer experience is seamless and integrated. Amazon would never upgrade shipping to overnight, for example, as Zappos does, except through the Amazon Prime program. Amazon’s warehouse is very innovative, but Amazon is focused on warehousing and lowering costs. Zappos has learned it’s about more than just cost. It’s about user experience, and people are willing to pay for that.”
The relationship between Zappos delivery strength and the velocity of product delivery is well articulated by Marshall Kirkpatrick, vice president of content development at ReadWrite-Web. Marshall notes, “Amazon is a master of the supply chain. It’s got so much capacity, … and Zappos is no slouch at rushing goods to your house. Just last week the Zappos elves delivered a new pair of shoes to my home the morning after I ordered them late at night!”
In my view, the magic of service velocity at Zappos might be the “elves,” but it definitely is linked to consistent leadership decisions giving priority to rapid service, the inculcation of a sense of service urgency, and a commitment to deliver beyond industry standards and customer expectations.
When leadership decided to open the Zappos Fulfillment Center in 2002, the “where” of that warehouse decision came down to issues of delivery speed. By selecting Fulfillment Center locations near Worldport, the worldwide air hub for UPS (United Parcel Service), located at the Louisville International Airport in Kentucky, Zappos was immediately able to provide one-, two-, or three-day conventional transit time to a larger percentage of the U.S. population than from any other shipping point. According to Justin Williams, project manager at Zappos, the Kentucky location set the stage for a service velocity mindset: “We understood that leadership’s choice of location for the Fulfillment Centers came from leaders stepping into the place of customers waiting to get their merchandise. That mindset carries over to all of us. No one likes to wait, particularly for something they are excited about. The way we develop our delivery system shocks people, even those inside of our company. We’ve actually had our own customer service reps cancel orders and reenter new ones because they didn’t believe that an order placed at 12:30 a.m. was actually going to get delivered that same day. Our reps thought there was an error in the system, and they’d try to alert us at the Fulfillment Centers. Nothing was wrong; the order was fulfilled at 1:00 a.m., to be delivered by 1:00 p.m. the same day.”
This service velocity mindset starts at the top of the organization and is held in areas well beyond the Fulfillment Centers in Kentucky. Anthony Vicars, director of fulfillment, notes, “When Tony Hsieh received an unexpected $75,000 to $100,000 credit from UPS, he demonstrated how important speed and service are by telling UPS to just exhaust the credit by giving next-day delivery upgrades for upcoming customer shipments. You know your leadership is serious about service speed when your CEO says, ‘No thanks. I don’t want our money back; we will just give customers complimentary upgrades. Give the credit back to the customer in the form of more expedited deliveries.’”
Employees notice when leaders make choices on behalf of service velocity, and so do customers. Rapid order fulfillment is one of the most commonly mentioned aspects of Zappos service excellence, according to online reviews. The following examples are very typical of tweets and customer posts about how the Zappos service velocity captures the attention and gratitude of their consumers:
@MorphMpls
Completely blown away by @zappos delivery time. Ordered Thurs noon, shoes on doorstep noon Friday. And standard shipping! Wow.:)
My daughter’s birthday shoes came so quickly. I am amazed. How could I have ordered them Monday evening and received them in the early afternoon Tuesday. You have exceeded my expectations and more importantly you have made for a very happy birthday girl. Thank you Zappos!
I’ll admit it, your delivery speed has spoiled me, but please don’t stop! Why is it when I order online from other web-sites, it takes so long to get my merchandise? It’s about time for other online retailers to step up to the Zappos Experience!!!
Service velocity happens at every contact point between the customer and Zappos. While customers overtly appreciate the “lightning fast” delivery, some of the rapidness of Zappos would probably be noticed only if it were missing. César Ritz, founder of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, once said, “People like to be served, but invisibly.” Two areas where invisible but important service takes place at Zappos are the load speed of pages on the Zappos website and the urgency with which Customer Loyalty Team (CLT) members answer calls.
As evidenced by the work of the user experience team in Chapter 4, Zappos invests heavily in making the website user experience as easy as possible. In addition, the company spends a considerable amount of money to make the website experience fast. In fact, according to Joseph Yi, who writes a social commerce blog entitled Viralogy, “If an eCommerce site is slow in loading a page, they are risking losing a potential sale. In an age where consumers have more and more options when it comes to shopping online, making sure that your site is optimized to bring a user the best experience possible includes making sure that your site has fast load times. If you take a look at some of the top eCommerce sites, page load times are in and around 3.5 seconds max.” According to Joseph, the load times for these top sites have been assessed as follows: Dell.com at 3.3 seconds, BlueNile.com at 2.8 seconds, Overstock.com at 2.6 seconds, and the winner, Zappos, at 1.9 seconds.
From the standpoint of response urgency at the Zappos call center, the company sets performance goals of answering 80 percent of incoming calls within 20 seconds. Since Zappos is concerned about the customer experience, not simply service speed, call response urgency is targeted, but the length of a call is not. The goal is not to rush customers off the phone, but instead to be readily available to take calls as they are received. Mary Teitsma, a member of the CLT, notes, “While some of our customer calls last for hours, we focus on being quick to answer. From there, the call will commence at the customer’s pace. With some customers, it becomes clear that they want to get on and off the call. In those cases, we need to address the customer’s issue quickly. I’ve had customers where I’ve literally placed an order within a minute’s time because they’re in a rush.” Zappos has found a way to manage the logistic challenge of staffing its call center to answer quickly, but then pace those inbound calls to match the customers’ needs. In fact, Zappos not only is able to hit its call-answering speed goal, but typically well exceeds it. Pam Cinko, Zappos Insights logistical ninja, demonstrates the significance of this answering speed by noting, “I was giving a tour of our facilities and mentioned our phone response standards. A little bit later, I thought one of the people on my tour was lagging behind, only to find that he was on his cell phone. He said, ‘Hey, I just dialed the call center, and you were right; they picked up within five rings.’ The man then told the CLT member who had answered his call, ‘Hey, I’m here on the tour; I wanted to say hi to you! Where are you sitting?’ The CLT member stood up and waved, and they finished their conversation face to face.” Where else would this happen?
Most customers notice only if a company fails to respond swiftly to their needs, but because of the Zappos reputation for response time, sometimes people, like the caller on the tour, are actually testing the service velocity at Zappos. The magnitude of these experiments is reflected in online reviews like the following:
Zappos zaps the customer experience at every turn … It starts with fast servers and an easy quick online check out process. It follows through to swift, clear order tracking communication and amazing product delivery. I had heard the hype and decided I would conduct a test to see if Zappos could match the claims I had been hearing. So I ordered merchandise from Zappos and comparable goods from a competitor. The results—Zappos delivery within 36 hours; the competitor—well it’s been three weeks and I am still waiting.
While most of us notice slow-loading Web pages or long delivery times, can you imagine your customers consciously clocking your service velocity, assessing your server page load speed, or shopping you and your competitors simultaneously? As business leaders, we would be wise to assume that service velocity is something our customers are always either consciously or unconsciously assessing.
A significant source of customer distress and frustration comes from dealing with ill-informed or completely clueless staff members. In fact, studies of customer dissatisfaction consistently show how important it is to have employees who can address the customer’s need during the customer’s first contact. That research also suggests that the prime reason customers stop dealing with a business is poor service interactions, not faulty products. According to Tony Hsieh, “While most contact with Zappos happens on our website without human interaction, on average, every customer contacts us at least once at some point during his lifetime.”
Given that most Zappos customers will have limited direct contact with Zapponians, the impact of those infrequent telephone or chat contacts takes on greater significance. In the buzz lingo of customer experience design, these types of important interactions are referred to as “moments of truth,” a phrase coined by Jan Carlzon when he was the president and CEO of Scandinavian Airlines System.
While the personal aspects of these contacts will be addressed in the upcoming principle, let’s take a look at how Zappos makes sure that knowledgeable Zapponians are ready to represent the brand during these human-to-human moments of truth. In large measure, knowledge readiness at Zappos is a direct result of the company’s disciplined commitment to being a learning organization. In 1990, Peter Senge wrote the revolutionary book The Fifth Discipline, in which he urged business leaders to practice a consistent approach to knowledge acquisition. Senge specifically defined learning organizations as places “where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.”
Consistent with this approach, the leadership at Zappos has supported continuous training that results in engaged customers and that nurtures the personal and professional aspirations of Zappos employees. This disciplined approach to knowledge transfer differs from the more situational commitments seen in other businesses. Unlike other companies, Zappos views training as an essential investment that needs to remain constant and not be subject to economic factors. In essence, Zappos sees learning as being essential to its mission. At a tactical level, Zappos often must train or retrain employees on how to deliver customer service that drives the Zappos Experience.
Zappos leadership supports a training model that focuses not only on the “satisfaction” of customers, but on their “happiness” as well. Upon completing the CLT orientation outlined in Chapter 3, Zappos staff members throughout the organization receive core classes in skills that are essential to knowledgeable service delivery. Aaron Magness, senior director, Brand Marketing & Business Development, notes, “A lot of companies will hire applicants largely based on their education level. They’ll hire MBAs because of the skills those individuals probably acquired during their education. We, on the other hand, will hire primarily based on the passions of the individuals, and then we will teach them to do what we need them to do. Of course, our approach has positives and negatives. Sometimes we’ll get incredibly passionate people without the true skill set for their role, and that’s where our well-developed training comes into play.” While the comprehensive Zappos training curriculum, Pipeline, will be examined in Chapter 8, “Zappos University,” an example of this core skill development occurs for CLT members as they enter the “incubation phase” of their training.
According to Ashley Perry, a newly hired Zappos CLT member, “Incubation lasts a little over three weeks. It furthers your learning through classes in things like how to write high-quality e-mails, which gets a new hire e-mail certified. Additionally, the new employees receive training on how to be excellent at all aspects of their job, like handling customer returns. They will have been taking calls from their third week of orientation training, and that continues all the way through incubation.” Laura Miller, a CLT member who is an ambassador for the incubation program, talks about her role as a mentor to new hires who are going through incubation: “As an ambassador, I will take my ‘incubabies’ around and just talk with them. I’ll ask how their calls are going and informally be available with insight, tips, and tools.” Laura’s comments not only suggest a balance between on-the-job and classroom training at Zappos, but also show how experienced staff members are encouraged to be responsible for advancing the training and development of their peers.
An example of what Laura alludes to as tools is the Zappos informational wiki. As Chris Peake, director of performance, merchandising, describes it, “The wiki is a resource where CLT members can find additional information by brand and category and get additional answers for frequently asked questions. You want to make sure you are giving the customers the right information. So, CLT members have that information right at their fingertips, in addition to all the other resources that are already online.” Having the right information just a click away when the customer needs it most—what a great goal for any business.
Suffice it to say the incubation period of CLT members is just a small part of ongoing processes to elevate the quality of service that occurs during CLT calls or online chat sessions. Since many of the additional knowledge development tools (supervisor involvement, customer feedback, and the “Sharing Great Calls” program) also affect the emotional connection between Zappos staff members and customers, those tools will be discussed in Chapter 7. For now, it’s important to simply appreciate that service skills training and product knowledge acquisition are continual processes at Zappos. Leaders throughout the organization appreciate the benefit of ongoing skills development both for those receiving the training and for peers who serve as trainers and mentors. Learning benefits both the teacher and the student!
How can I put this gently? Sometimes, despite its knowledgeable staff, operational redundancies, and extreme effort to deliver products easily, quickly, and accurately, Zappos gets it wrong! In the course of millions of site visits and tens of thousands of calls and purchases each day, Zappos makes mistakes. But Zappos doesn’t categorize those errors as failures; instead, each of those mistakes serves as an outstanding opportunity for both its business and its customers.
The work of researchers like Amy Smith and Ruth Bolton, published in the Journal of Service Research, shows that a company’s recovery from mistakes has substantial impact on customer perceptions and on the future purchases of those consumers. Research indicates that customers who experience a service breakdown and receive a swift, helpful resolution are more likely to recommend that business to a friend or colleague than customers who experienced no service issues at all. Like that of many great service brands, the leadership at Zappos clearly sends the message that some of the most challenging and important service moments occur in response to Zappos errors. Former CFO Alfred Lin shares the lengths to which Zappos will go when the company is the source of a customer’s inconvenience: “If we screw up, we will absolutely make it right for the customer. There was a situation where a lady contacted me and said, ‘All I wanted was this pair of shoes that I ordered.’” According to Alfred, that customer had gotten black shoes instead of blue ones. She brought that to the attention of the CLT staff members, but in their efforts to expedite a fix for the problem, they twice sent more black shoes, not blue ones.
Alfred continues, “When this customer contacted me, she kindly said, ‘You guys look like you are a reputable company, but I’m not going to do business with you anymore.” In addition to refunding her money, offering his apologies, and giving the customer a coupon for an additional pair of shoes at Zappos, Alfred and other Zapponians kept searching for the genesis of the problem and for complete resolution. Alfred shared, “We found the source of our error, which involved moving into a new distribution building. But that shouldn’t be relevant to our customer; we were totally wrong. To make matters worse, the blue shoes were no longer being produced and couldn’t be reordered. That did not stop us. We contacted our Clarks representative (the manufacturer of her desired shoe), and thanks to incessant calling on his part, we were finally able to find her blue shoes in a Clarks retail store. A few weeks later, we were able to send the blue ones to her.” Alfred’s “blue shoe” story is an example of the tone for service recovery set from the top at Zappos. Clearly, apologies, refunds, and a free pair of shoes were not enough, given the circumstances. Even though the customer had clearly stated that she was not going to do business with Zappos again, that didn’t stop the Zappos team (and its vendor partner Clarks) from hunting down those blue shoes.
Great service organizations won’t end their service recovery processes until they make their customer whole again (integrity derives from the root for the word integer, which denotes wholeness). This commitment to wholeness is maintained even when the customer has vowed never to do business with that company again. Companies like Zappos act swiftly, take responsibility (often even when the fault is beyond their control), enable staff discretion to fix problems, compensate fairly, do a little something extra to acknowledge inconveniences, and follow up until the issue is brought to satisfactory closure.
It is leadership tenacity, passion, and follow-through that inspire empowered Zappos staff members to produce customer service recovery stories like one shared by customer Karen Batchelor in a Social Media for Small Business blog post aptly entitled “My Un-complaint against Zappos.” Karen explains:
Last week I ordered 2 pairs of black cargo shorts by Jag for the summer that’s finally coming to Michigan. I’ve ordered from Zappos before, … and in the past whatever I ordered was available in my size and arrived as promised—end of story. But when my Zappos package arrived today, I was disappointed. There were 2 pairs of black shorts inside but in 2 different sizes—one not mine. … I picked up the phone 1) to complain and 2) to see if that second pair of shorts was still available. This is where the story gets good. My call was connected to a very cordial Zappos customer service rep. … When I explained my dilemma, she went into action. … She checked to see if the other pair of shorts was still available. The bad news was they weren’t. Darn it but I’ll live. Then the nice young customer service rep apologized profusely and offered the following solution to the Zappos mistake in filling my order. … She e-mailed me a return label for the UPS package AND a return form completely filled in with all the details of my wrong size black shorts. No need to fill out the form while trying to find an SKU number somewhere on the garment. She enrolled me in the Zappos VIP program which gets me an upgrade of 1-day shipping on any future orders. When I decided to order another item for $7 more than the shorts, she told me she wouldn’t charge me for the difference. And finally, she gave me a $10 coupon I can use for future purchases. I’m still picking myself up off the floor.
In many ways, the Zappos approach to service recovery, as evidenced in Karen’s post, is an amplification of all aspects of the Zappos service platform. Because Zappos draws people to purchase from it based on the company’s service reputation, staff members have to be able to turn negative interactions into happy endings. Dissatisfied or disappointed customers can quickly become vocal detractors unless breakdowns are seen as opportunities for “delivering wow through service.” A knowledgeable Zappos employee living the company values apologized to Karen about a Zappos error. In the process, that employee swiftly eased Karen’s effort and went to the trouble of making sure that Karen was not just satisfied but happy, albeit “floored” by the experience. In many ways, Karen’s service recovery story also captures the last element in Zappos basic service template: the power of surprise!
I am convinced that customers will say “wow” in response to service in two basic circumstances:
1. When you exceed their expectations
2. When you make a personal emotional connection with them
Since Chapter 6 will focus on creating personal emotional connections, let’s examine how Zappos delivers service that addresses the first of these two conditions: exceeding expectations.
While many people talk about exceeding customer expectations, very few of them discuss the nature of those expectations in the first place. From my perspective, customer expectations are easily evaluated in terms of those that are predicted and those that are normative. By predicted, I am talking about realistic, practical, or anticipated outcomes that emerge from personal experiences, reported experiences of others, and sources of knowledge such as the media. In essence, predicted expectations are what customers think will be realistic given their understanding of your industry. Normative expectations, by contrast, are based on what customers believe should or ought to happen; these beliefs are not what customers have come to expect, but what they think is right to expect. Zappos delivers “wow” in numerous ways by exceeding both predicted and normative expectations.
From a predicted perspective, many customers have come to expect that online retailers will make them pay for shipping, and that if a return is needed, that shipping will also be at the customer’s expense. Almost from the beginning, Zappos exceeded industry standards on both those fronts. (Some e-retailers have since emulated Zappos, particularly on free shipping to the customer.) Customers have also come to expect that if they need to call the online company as a result of a problem, finding the call-center number on the company’s website will be a challenge. Zappos puts “24/7 Customer Service (800) 927-7671” prominently on every page of its site. The choices of Zappos leaders and the actions of Zapponians are geared to consistently exceeding customer expectations, particularly when those expectations are based on the long call wait times, outsourced call-center workers, and scripted customer service interactions offered by other providers.
From a normative perspective, Internet customers believe their items “should” arrive on the date promised at checkout. On this dimension, Zappos often dazzles customers by randomly surprising them with free shipping upgrades or giving them status as VIPs, thus ensuring them free overnight shipping for all future purchases, the ability to call a special call-center number, access to a VIP ordering page, and other exclusive benefits. Anthony Vicars, director of fulfillment, puts it well: “On our website, we say free ground shipping with four to five days delivery. I’d say a little over 70 percent goes out next day air. Customers feel valued when you do more than you say you will. That alone can make the difference between okay and wow service.” When customers get more than they believe they should, they are wowed, as evidenced by these representative tweets from customers:
@Hyjenrenee
wow, @zappos … how do you do it? i’m amazed every single time with the next day delivery.
@Dsalt
If every internet company was like zappos nobody would ever leave their house to shop. I ordered 2 day delivery and was bumped up to next day air free; my order gets here tomorrow.
@DrawingInsights
zappos I ordered a free culture book 2 days ago, you said it would be here in 6 days. … Why’s it already here?!?! You guys are the best!
@mikestenger
Just became a VIP. I felt important already, now they’re just making ice cream available WITH the cake!”
The double-edged sword of exceeding customer expectations, whether they are predicted or normative, is that once you deliver extraordinary service, extraordinary can become ordinary and expected. Zappos has created a legion of raving fans that use social media to talk incessantly to their families, friends, colleagues, and neighbors about the service excellence of the brand. That, coupled with significant media attention about service speed at Zappos as well as free upgrades, has produced high expectations for service delivery. Chris Raeburn, a respected customer service blogger, put it this way on his site Service Encounters Onstage: “My experience went off without a hitch through every moment of truth. The registration-through-purchase experience on the site, the in-process updates, and the fulfillment were as expected, and I ended up having a good experience buying a good pair of shoes for a good price. The entire experience was good—pretty much exactly as I had expected. And there’s Zappos’ problem. Because of considerable build-up, … Zappos would have had to absolutely rock my service world in order to be notable. … For companies that set high levels of expectations, it is extremely difficult … to exceed them. Unless something goes monumentally wrong and is spectacularly recovered, it’s unlikely the experience will seem more than adequate. But in a time when many businesses seek to establish and perform to an adequate level of service expectations, Zappos seeks out a higher level of criticism. That in itself says that much of what we read about their culture might actually be true.”
Some leaders might see the ever-escalating nature of customer expectations as an exercise in futility. It could be likened to the plight of Sisyphus, the Corinthean king of Greek mythology who was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill each day, only to have it roll back down at night. What’s the point of delivering great service if it will soon just become good service? The immediate answer is that if you don’t keep reaching, your average service will soon become poor.
In all candor, providing great service is never-ending and, at times, frustrating. Whether you compare yourself to world-class service providers, constantly adjust to customers’ increasing expectations, or simply try to be better than you were the day before, service excellence is a dynamic, challenging, and rewarding journey. When your service delivery becomes predictable, it is probably time to recalibrate and look for additional ways to exceed customer expectations. Zappos is always looking for avenues to positively surprise customers and meet the “predictability challenge.” For example, it has partnered with companies like The Learning Channel (TLC) and Red Bull to put unexpected objects in customers’ delivery boxes. The Red Bull energy drink “surprise” was timed to jump-start a new year and involved the inclusion of cans of Red Bull in 150,000 customer boxes and packages. Tweets about the Red Bull wow (some of which include photo links of the bubble-wrapped can) are exemplified by
@matrixmagicman
Zappos you rock! I got a Red Bull enclosed with my order today. How did you know I needed one? Thanks!
@ressler
Huzzah! Zappos shipped my order overnight for free *and* tossed in a can of Red Bull. Thanks Zappos team!
The Learning Channel provided 25,000 pairs of red flip-flops that were unexpectedly placed in customers’ order packages during a monthlong summer surprise event.
Through strategic partnerships, there is no end to the variety of inserts that customers might find in their Zappos box. In essence, Zappos has found a way to intermittently surprise customers with items that are unexpected. The mere act of delivering something that the customer did not know was coming is a key to widespread wow delivery.
To experience the Zappos ability to deliver surprise, go to zappified.com/flip or direct your mobile QR reader at the image given here.
Zappos diligently looks for effective ways to improve its operational excellence, increase personal service delivery, and go beyond the predictability challenge to exceed expectations and surprise customers. In language used by many Zapponians, Zappos leaders pursue a BHAG, or Big Hairy Audacious Goal (term coined by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras), to “have the best customer service in the world.” That goal sits well in a culture that is committed to embracing and driving change.
In many ways, Zappos has accepted the encouragement of American humorist Will Rogers when Rogers suggested, “Why not go out on a limb? That’s where the fruit is.” Chapter 6 helps you venture out farther onto a limb where you are likely to find the most profitable fruit—a personal connection with your customer.
Chapter 5 Ideas to Run With
Service excellence often comes down to the velocity of service delivery and the knowledge level of staff members.
Service velocity is important not only in the product delivery process but across every consumer contact point and every channel of contact with a customer.
While most customers will notice only when service components such as accuracy, ease, or speed are absent, some will consciously test you on those dimensions.
Customers most often complain about a lack of knowledgeable service staff, which often results in their having to repeatedly seek fulfillment of their needs.
Learning organizations practice disciplined support of training, irrespective of economic factors that may negatively affect the business.
Effective service recovery often produces stronger relationships with customers than the business would have enjoyed had it not made a mistake in the first place.
Leadership plays a significant role in setting a tone for issues such as urgency and service recovery.
Service leaders innovate policies and processes that exceed industry standards.
As you set higher service standards, you must accept the challenge of elevated expectations. The fruits of business success exist on those higher branches of excellence.
Partner with other businesses to positively surprise customers. The possibilities are endless!