It’s easy for leaders to encourage staff members to create personal emotional connections with customers. However, it is quite another thing to help them continually grow in service excellence. At Zappos, the process of growing talent in personalized service is tireless and comprehensive.
In the Zappos call center, for example, a Customer Loyalty Team trainee is evaluated on all aspects of service delivery. Through a call review form, a new employee will routinely be rated (with a 1, 2, or 3) on a wide range of quality dimensions, including the degree to which the trainee forms a personal emotional connection with the customer. In the past, the same rating system was used to evaluate the service quality of every CLT staff member. That process of quality measurement, however, was changed in response to staff feedback solicited in an e-mail survey.
According to Zapponian Tami Lemke, “One of the things we want to do is deliver happiness inside and outside of Zappos, and the quality assurance program was creating a little fear in our people and leaving them feeling like they weren’t in control. Having a sense of control is linked to happiness, and we wanted to promote growth and not fear, so we made a few changes. To reduce anxiety, we went from performance metrics to pure feedback. We completely did away with scores for full-fledged CLT staff. Supervisors and staff members now just talk about the things the CLTs liked about identified calls and the things they could’ve done better. Essentially, we are discussing how we can continue to elevate the Zappos Experience while helping CLTs attain their service goals.” Tami also notes that in order for employees to have greater control, “We implemented several methods to include the CLTs in picking which of their calls would be reviewed. For example, in our self-assessment process, which we do at least once a month, a CLT lead will pull up a huge list of recent calls. The team member looks at this list and chooses a call, and both the lead and the team member listen to a recording of the phone call. We review that call against key elements of the Zappos Experience, including the strength of the personal emotional connection achieved.”
For many leaders, it would take a major “gut check” to move to a true feedback model, essentially letting go of the desire to “grade” performance. Many leaders believe that accountability is linked to numbers and that employee behavior must be quantitatively graded. By contrast, the leaders at Zappos see regular, open, and honest conversations as a key force in elevating performance. At Zappos, the shift from top-down evaluations to partnered conversations makes for happier employees, a less defensive workplace, and an environment of enthusiasm for service growth.
The revised Zappos assessment tool, without the scoring system, is referred to as the Happiness Form because it has the words “Delivering Happiness One Call at a Time” written boldly across the top. The tool is divided into sections that cover the CLT member’s “greeting, personal emotional connection, service, seeking/supplying information, and conclusion.” (If you are interested in a detailed look at the call review form or the Happiness Form, you can download both in their entirety as a member of Zappos Insights. The complimentary 30-day membership opportunity for Zappos Insights can be found at the back of the book.) To give an overall sense of the uniqueness of this approach, I will summarize just a few of the service expectations that are set forth by the leadership at Zappos for each of these categories. This sample from the Happiness Form is likely to prove handy across service settings:
Greeting. CLT members are expected to make a genuine offer of assistance and introduce themselves by name. They are asked to present with an upbeat tone and to demonstrate a personal flair or creativity.
Personal emotional connection. Calls from CLT staff members are assessed for such things as helpfulness, patience, sincerity, genuineness, and the degree to which the CLT member engages in conversations about the customer and/or Zappos products.
Service. Evaluations of service look at areas such as a CLT member’s ability to provide multiple solutions for each customer’s need or inquiry, the degree to which the CLT member satisfies all the customer’s stated needs, whether the CLT member follows through on all customer promises, and the clear and concise documentation of key aspects of the customer’s experience.
Seeking and supplying information. Calls are reviewed for dimensions like verification of the customer’s full shipping address and the degree to which accurate information is provided by the CLT member.
Conclusion. The final stage of assessment looks at whether the full order was reviewed, whether the CLT member made an effort to wow the customer with an unexpected perk, and whether the CLT member invited the customer into an ongoing relationship with Zappos.
The beauty of the Happiness Form assessment process is that it emphasizes both quality in basic service execution (Principle 2’s focus on knowledgeable staff, helping customers get their needs met the first time, and generally providing timely, accurate service) and areas that are geared toward forging the personal emotional connection, delivering wow, and leaving customers feeling happy. By helping Zapponians develop goals across these service areas and providing regular, honest, and nonthreatening feedback, supervisors enable employees to grow in these areas of service excellence and in their ability to offer personal care to customers. Leaders, quality assurance professionals, and CLT members work together for the common goal of “delivering happiness one call at a time.” This is a goal that results in reactions on Twitter like that of @davyjoneslock, who tweets, “Zappos is successful because they provide human connections and happiness. More companies need to get this! Business is about people!”
No matter what business you’re in, the success, growth, and development of your service talent hinges on the regular and varied feedback mechanisms that your people have at their disposal. At Zappos, in addition to the monthly self-evaluation calls, CLT members also receive full-circle feedback through “service observes,” “Sharing Great Calls,” and Net Promoter Scores (NPS).
Service observes occur when CLT leads unobtrusively listen in on the calls of their staff members and offer feedback after the live call. Psychologists who specialize in operant conditioning and learning have consistently shown that immediacy is a critical feature in shaping behavior change. By coaching staff members as soon as they complete a call, Zappos leaders create immediate opportunities for growth and reinforce positive service behaviors.
From the standpoint of positive reinforcement and modeling best practices, Sharing Great Calls is a self-nominated review structure described by Christina Colligan. Christina, CLT manager, notes, “The Sharing Great Calls process occurs when CLT members get off the phone and feel they have made a really great connection with a customer. They then send the information about the call to their lead. The lead contacts the customer directly, usually through e-mail, but sometimes also through a telephone call. Typically the lead gets e-mail responses back from those customers, many who share very interesting, detailed, and over-the-top praise for their experience. We get well over a hundred Sharing Great Calls examples every week, and we use them not only for quality feedback but for training purposes as well.”
Sharing Great Calls creates an opportunity for the customers’ voices to loop back through Zappos so that the culture of service can be reinforced. An example of an e-mail exchange between a Zappos CLT lead and a very happy Zappos customer follows. The CLT lead’s e-mail to customer Barbara Friedman asked about a single Zappos call, but Barbara could not resist heaping praise on three Zappos CLT members. The interchange begins with an e-mail introduction from the Zappos lead:
Our Team Member said what a great time she had talking to you! We have started a special program recently to provide further feedback to our Team Members. We want to give our Team Members an extra pat on the back, so I have a huge favor to ask of you. It will not take much of your time, but it will help us enormously. Please tell us about the service you received and any points of feedback regarding the conversation you had with our Team Member.
Here is Barbara’s unedited response:
Well, I don’t know where to start; but my second pair of shoes arrived today in less than 24 hours, and though I never expected to purchase them, your wonderful staff made it irresistible for me to let down my frugal barriers and order another color in the shoes I discovered online Saturday evening. Those shoes arrived magically early Monday morning! Unheard of!!!
When I discovered my last name was missing from my order confirmation Saturday evening, I phoned to correct it, and spoke to CRISTAL, who was warm, concerned, and knowledgeable (I have discovered this is a common thread to all Zappos staff!) and after fixing the address she invited me to be a VIP.ZAPPOS member! The benefits, I learned, are overnight shipping which really is overnight, and a separate website with many goodies! I was very grateful for the honor, thanked Cristal, and expected to receive the shoes by Tuesday or Wednesday. They arrived almost at the crack of dawn Monday morning!
So, I called Zappos once I had recovered from shock, to tell them about my amazement, and there I was befriended by DAWN, who regaled me with her first overnight order and how similar her reaction was to mine. Talk about shock and awe! And I made my second friend at Zappos, as her warmth and welcome were also like returning home to family!
After hanging up the phone, I tried on my shoes which Zappos carries in NARROW, an almost impossible width to find in South Florida, and just wallowed in the comfort for several minutes before deciding to treat myself to the same shoe in another color (even though I owned a similar one in a medium width) and phoned back to Zappos, where KRYSTYN answered my call. Again, that incredible feeling of being part of Zappos special family! She quickly ascertained that the shoe I requested was available, assured me Zappos and its amazing staff were always there for me, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week … and I really have the feeling that they would all be there to support me during any crisis that might arrive in my life!!! How does Zappos manage this?
I am so impressed. I have mentioned it to several friends, including my son, who asked “You just discovered Zappos?” … and informed me it is my granddaughter’s favorite shopping site! So now I have learned how to take care of gifting this special young lady without ever leaving home!
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my pleasure received from my new friends at Zappos!
Barbara Friedman, FL
(You can find more Sharing Great Calls transcripts in Appendix A.)
“Her warmth and welcome were like returning home to family” and “I really have the feeling that they would all be there to support me during any crisis that might arrive in my life” are pretty good indicators that the staff members at Zappos made the personal emotional connection that delivered both wow and happiness. To truly build a service culture, customer-facing staff members need to hear about their service successes. What better way could there be to provide that feedback than by having managers solicit comments from customers with whom a positive connection was probably made? Customer service can be difficult, negative interactions are stressful, and customers can fail to show gratitude. Thus, it is extremely important that leaders build morale by looking for ways to share stories of service excellence. Moreover, recordings of these “great” interactions, when accompanied by the customers’ praise for how they were served, often result in powerful teaching tools on what it takes to deliver wow through service.
The Zappos leadership does not limit this feedback loop to call-center, live chat, or e-mail support staff members. For example, customer praise regarding delivery speed and other forms of related customer gratitude is regularly shared with members of the distribution staff so that they can appreciate the impact of their efforts. Mary Johnson, tour guide at the Fulfillment Centers, shares, “About 30 percent of our orders are returned to the Fulfillment Centers because customers will order several sizes and send back the ones that didn’t fit. With these returns, we receive a lot of things in the boxes that don’t belong to us—car keys, remote controls, and even steak knives that were used to open the boxes. We ship back everything we can, and I remember hearing praise from one customer, who let us know that she had blamed her kids for stealing money out of her wallet. She was really upset until she got an envelope back from Zappos with a considerable amount of cash that she had accidentally dropped in the box of a returned item. The customer was thrilled that she got her money back. We were thrilled for her and proud to be recognized for doing the right thing.” Leaders at Zappos see that sharing stories of service excellence is an important part of crafting a culture that builds relationships with customers. For that reason, Zappos leadership decided that qualitative feedback mechanisms should be linked to more objective measures, which led them to implement the Net Promoter Score. That linkage is exactly what we will be discussing next.
In addition to providing feedback on the impact of great calls, the Zappos leadership gives each CLT member the results from e-mail surveys concerning customer zealotry. One of the results of those surveys is the Net Promoter Score. The NPS reflects the proportion of customers who are likely to demonstrate loyalty and promote your business. Through inquiry, customers are classified into one of three categories: promoters, passives, and detractors. The Net Promoter Score is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are in the detractor category from the percentage of customers who are in the promoter category. To determine those categories, Fred Reichheld, author of The Ultimate Question, recommends that you use a 10-point response scale and ask customers how likely they are to refer your company to a friend or colleague. Respondents who answer 9 or 10 are promoters, those who answer 7 or 8 are passives, and those who answer 6 or below are detractors.
At Zappos, for example, after a customers speaks with a CLT team member and/or after a customer places an order on the site, Zappos sends out an e-mail that guides the calculation of the NPS and collects other helpful information about the customer’s view of his experience. Examples of the breadth of questions asked in these surveys include
On a scale of 0 to 10, 10 being the highest score, how likely are you to recommend Zappos to a friend or a family member?
If you had to name one thing that we could improve upon, what would that be?”
During your last interaction with us, you contacted a member of our Customer Loyalty Team. On a scale of 0 to 10, if you had your own company that was focused upon service, how likely would you be to hire this person to work for you?
Overall, would you describe the service you received from (insert name of customer loyalty rep) as good, bad, or fantastic?
What exactly stood out as being good or bad about this service?
Each day, Zappos leadership tracks and posts the aggregate results from all Zappos customers who completed surveys. Staff members can then easily view the NPS results, and other information from the surveys, alongside key performance indicators such as call answer time and call volume. NPS scores at Zappos are consistently in the 80 to 90 range; Fred Reichheld describes this range of scores as being “in the stratosphere.” Despite that amazing level of engagement, Zappos leaders seek out follow-up conversations with customers in the large promoter group and the small detractor category. In addition, from the perspective of personal feedback, each CLT member is provided with helpful data derived from the e-mails received in response to calls that they specifically handled.
What a vast array of constructive information—feedback from supervisors, input from an identified group of great calls, and unscreened data from the voices of all customers, solicited through scientific metrics. At all levels and across the entire organization, the leadership at Zappos listens, shares, measures, coaches, and encourages growth in service professionalism.
In its classic tagline, the Florida Orange Growers Association proclaimed, “Orange juice is not just for breakfast anymore.” Bending that line a bit, at Zappos, “Personal connections aren’t just for customers anymore.” In fact, leaders at Zappos have a passion for using open communication to foster personal emotional connections, to deliver wow, and to generate happiness for staff members, vendors, and even noncustomers.
Tony Hsieh uses the metaphor of a greenhouse to demonstrate the importance of creating open conversations and fueling growth: “In some organizations, leaders act as though they are the strongest, tallest plants, and all others should look up to them and aspire to be like them. I think of myself more as an architect of the greenhouse. It’s my job to enable all plants—our people—to flourish and reach their full potential. As leaders, we need to openly communicate with our teams and do everything we can to produce the right conditions so every individual can grow fully.” Principle 4, “S T R E T C H,” details the educational opportunities that are offered to Zapponians to fuel their development, and Principle 5, “Play to Win,” explores how leaders foster an incredibly cohesive Zappos family. But for now, let’s take a moment to explore the bidirectional and transparent communication that serves as the foundation for personal emotional connections with employees and ultimately builds trust.
ZAPPIFIED BRAIN BREAK
Did you know that executives at Zappos literally work in a jungle? Tony Hsieh and other Zappos senior leaders, referred to as the monkeys, occupy a group of desks in the center of the Zappos Headquarters. This area features lush green foliage dangling from the ceiling above the cubicles. Thus, the area of desks is aptly referred to as “Monkey Row.” Think about the tone set in terms of humility, accessibility, and fun when corporate leaders work in centrally located and playfully decorated cubicles. Leadership at Zappos is well beyond a open door policy. They thrive in a no door environment. Now you know about the jungle and the monkeys … so pass it on!
In every organization, leaders and staff members engage in regular, spontaneous, and informal conversations. Most companies go one step further and formalize an annual opportunity to listen to staff members’ feedback through an employee survey. By contrast, Zappos has taken staff input to the monthly “Five Second Happiness Survey” level. Every month, the leadership at Zappos essentially conducts an internal survey of the company’s employees, giving them the opportunity to complete an assessment in which they assign a quantifiable score and offer comments. While employees can complete the survey anonymously, the leaders personally respond to each comment if the staff member chooses to be identified. All input is posted, with both numeric scores and written comments. Zapponians are also advised of changes that came about as a result of the data collected each month. According to Rebecca Henry Ratner, HR director at Zappos, “Employee participation in the monthly survey varies anywhere between 60 and 85 percent. We trend those results within a week and immediately send them out to departments.”
The Five Second Happiness Survey asks staff members to provide numeric answers of 1, definitely; 2, sometimes; or 3, not at all to the following questions:
I believe that the company genuinely has a higher purpose beyond just profits.
My role in the Zappos Family has real purpose—it is more than just a job.
I feel that I am in control of my career path and that I am progressing in my personal and professional development within the Zappos Family.
I consider my coworkers to be like my family and friends.
I am very happy in my job.
Forging emotional connections with staff members isn’t about what you ask, but that you ask. It involves a willingness to seek input, inquire regularly, personally respond to what is shared, transparently communicate the input received, and take action on suggestions. In addition to the monthly Five Second Happiness Surveys, Zappos has perfected a series of other direct methods of staff communication, including
Candid leadership blogs
Daily sales reports
Messages communicated via video
An “ask anything” forum
Open access to Monkey Row
The candor of Tony’s blog (blogs.zappos.com/blogs/ceo -and-coo-blog) is reflected in his willingness to speak freely and emotionally on sensitive yet important issues throughout the company’s history. These posts have included the rationale for and anguish over layoffs in 2008, the anxieties and uncertainties of the company’s purchase by Amazon, discussion of the real growing pains encountered after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, a one-year retrospective on predictions that Tony made at the time of the acquisition, and disclosure of preliminary plans for a move of Zappos Headquarters from Henderson, Nevada, to downtown Las Vegas. In each instance, Tony has provided opportunities for public comments on his blog. He and other Zappos leaders are not controlling a leadership message by “top-down” blogging; they are inviting connection and dialogue. Tony also asks for e-mail input and often ends blogs with questions for staff members. These questions address such things as, “What do you want your personal brand and values to be? How can you use Twitter as a tool to help you grow as a person and be happier? How do you inspire people to pay attention to what matters to you?” In addition, Tony’s blog often begins discussions that are continued in future Q and A or all-hands meetings.
Beyond the blogging, daily e-mail updates are provided to every Zapponian, based on the view that too much information is better than too little. According to Jamie Naughton, speaker of the house at Zappos, “We want our employees to have lots of information, and maybe even more than they might want. Sharing information allows staff members the opportunity to make decisions that benefit us all. Our approach to communication is to forge partnerships with every single employee, not just have the top 5 percent of the company hold the corporate knowledge while everyone else works in the dark.” Jamie explains, “All of our sales numbers are e-mailed every day to our employees so that they know exactly how much we’re selling and how much we’re not selling.”
Jamie adds that information sharing has expanded and improved over time: “For example, one of the things we added was our target goals. That way, staff members can place sales and orders in perspective. This information helps our family see how we’re trending, how much we need to generate every day in order to meet our objectives, and it gives projections based on our current performance. By putting all this information in the hands of our staff on a daily basis, we know whether we’re going to miss, hit, or exceed our goals, and that helps us make changes and course corrections. There are no unpleasant sales surprises here at Zappos.” According to former Zappos CFO Alfred Lin, “The daily sales updates are just another part of full disclosure. That information is very detailed, with more than 1,200 brands reported, and it’s sent out to the whole company. You can actually see it on an hourly basis, or even every 15 minutes if you want.”
This refreshing approach to honest information exchange between leadership and staff shatters many old paradigms in which corporate communication teams huddle together in closed-door meetings, working on how to give a positive “spin” to sanctioned talking points. From a staff perspective, the communication approach at Zappos leads to reactions like those shared by Sheila Clinard, an employee in the refurbishment area of the Fulfillment Centers: “I feel like I really know what’s going on here at Zappos. The leaders don’t hide the truth from us. They also don’t want us to hide the truth from them or just tell them what they want to hear.” Vanessa Lawson, senior trainer at Zappos, echoes Sheila’s sentiment by indicating, “This is going to sound strange given the way many people feel about their employers these days, but I trust this company 1,010 percent. I trust that they are giving me the straight facts, that they are listening, and that they genuinely care about the well-being of all of us. That is a great feeling to have. I also appreciate that we are provided financial education at Zappos so we can see where the revenue goes. Most of our employees don’t realize how much of our revenue is used to run the business until that education is provided, and training helps us gain a greater appreciation of the numbers we see regularly.”
The leaders at Zappos understand that in order for employees to build customer relationships through “open and honest … communication,” those leaders must embody the same value in their relationships with staff members. David Hinden, Zappos merchandising assistant, may best summarize how open communication builds relationships for Zappos staff members and customers alike: “I think it is true for most people—the way you are treated often predicts the way you treat others. At Zappos, the communication flows from leaders to staff and staff to leaders. Trust is built by that honest sharing. Trust then gets extended to our customers, who in return trust us.” What a great recipe for creating healthy staff relationships and, by extension, personal customer relationships—tell the truth, communicate often, add active and genuine listening, act on the things you hear, enjoy the trust you’ve earned, and watch that trust move toward customers and back again toward your brand.
As a consultant, trainer, and corporate keynoter, I am a vendor. Speaking from vast experience, I can assure you that there is a great deal of variation in how different corporate clients view and treat their vendors. In some instances, vendors are dealt with as commodities; in others, we are “necessary evils”; and in yet others, vendor/client relationships are personal partnerships. In the early days of Zappos, despite the professional connections of shoe veterans like Fred Mossler, vendors were reluctant to have their products sold through a fledgling online shoe store site. As Tony Hsieh puts it, “From the beginning, we knew we were asking vendors to do business differently. To put their products on our site, vendors had to see and feel us treating them differently. We essentially focused on vendors as real partners—something that was not happening in the shoe industry. We cared about their success, and we wanted our choices to demonstrate our caring.”
A Zappos vendor, Butch Hazlett of New Balance, affirms Tony’s comment: “Zappos gets it. Clearly it starts with Tony’s vision, and then it takes someone like Fred to lead the charge, but the entire Zappos team took time to know our business and to develop mutually beneficial relationships with us and with all their vendors. Zappos shares information in a way that makes them and us more successful. Thanks to the Zappos culture, the care of vendors truly is unlike anything else in the industry, and we end up doing business with friends at Zappos—people who genuinely care about us.” Rather than trying to hide sales information from vendors, in the hope that it will give Zappos a competitive advantage when it is negotiating for inventory purchases, Zappos gives its vendors transparent access to real-time sales data. This transparency has helped both Zappos and its vendors work to improve the way products are positioned for sale on the Zappos site and increase overall sales volume.
Vendors consistently talk about the “Zappos difference.” Miles Olson, UGG Australia independent sales representative, reflects, “From early on, I would go over to Zappos on Friday afternoons. Fred and I would review our shared business and plan our upcoming work together. We would go have drinks after that, and it became family almost immediately. On many afternoons, we would wrap up our individual work and connect up at a happy hour. Zappos has been treating vendors like people from the outset, and it generated camaraderie. We grasped the Zappos vision, and they grasped ours. Zappos also found ways for us to share common short-, mid-, and long-term goals and allowed us to partner together to achieve shared objectives. They didn’t see us as adversaries that they had to prevail over in order to prosper.” In essence, Zappos developed a “vendor-centric” collaborative approach. Rather than interfacing with vendors as if those vendors were commodities that could be easily discarded, Zappos sought to serve and wow the vendors with an eye toward long-term relationships.
Tom Austin, a Clarks representative, says, “Zappos staff will go to great lengths to wow vendors through service. In fact, a group from Zappos came out to visit us at our warehouse in Hanover, Pennsylvania, and we were going to be having dinner together. One of the members of the Zappos team called all the restaurants in the area to find out which one had a Clarks reservation, and she then gave the restaurant staff the Zappos credit card to make sure Clarks didn’t have to pick up the tab. For me, it’s less about who pays and more about the level of care and consideration Zappos extends in all aspects of business and how they take the word partnership and run with it.” Tom adds, “The Zappos treatment of vendor reps is truly legendary in the industry. I frequently hear other vendors say, ‘Don’t you wish all our clients were like these guys?’”
Most vendors appreciate the work provided to them and usually strive to offer professional solutions, no matter how they are treated. However, not all customers are equal. Some get that little extra effort. When two clients have a similar profile and both have a special or urgent need, clients like Zappos often get served a little more quickly than those who treat vendors less as partners or with less respect.
Okay, so Zappos has personal connections with its customers, staff members, and vendors. Could there be yet another level of brand relationship? How about people who simply have an interest in your company? While many of the people who choose to visit the Zappos Headquarters for a complimentary or upgraded tour are customers of Zappos, some visitors just want to learn more from a business that has garnered positive media attention. Zappos welcomes all comers. From my perspective, it’s difficult to imagine that an office and call-center tour could become a highly desired activity for visitors in a city as dynamic as Las Vegas. But, we are talking about Zappos. In fact, it’s not unusual for Zappos to accommodate 1,200 tour-goers a month at its Headquarters, and often those tour guests are shuttled to and from the airport and/or their hotel.
To get a sense of what you might experience on a Zappos tour, join me for an inside look by going to www.zappified.com/tour or point your QR reader at the image given here.
So how did Zappos begin running a shuttle service and tours of its Headquarters in the first place? And why would a company commit resources to provide tours for people who may not even be customers?
Let’s hear a brief history from the official “Mayor of Zappos,” Jerry Tidmore. Jerry recalls, “In the early days, our call center was right next to the airport, and vendors would want to have product meetings with us. They would catch a cab out to us, and we would take them back to the airport. Fred decided we needed a shuttle to take vendors both ways, and we ended up getting a passenger vehicle. About six months later, we purchased a larger passenger vehicle, and about a year later, we needed our first 14-passenger bus to take vendors back and forth. We also conducted a program once a month to teach vendors how to access the data they needed to track the sales of their product on our site. In those days, many vendors were accustomed to selling only to stores like Nordstrom, and therefore, they had an interest in seeing our call center in action. So Fred said, ‘Jerry, can you give them a tour?’ And that’s how the tours started out.” Ultimately, the shuttle and tours expanded to anyone who had an interest in Zappos.
Since guests of the tour are given the royal treatment, including a keepsake of their time in the “royal chair,” the popularity of the Zappos tour has grown through word of mouth and has spurred priceless publicity for the company. While the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority popularized the advertising tag-line, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” the slogan doesn’t apply to the Zappos tours. In fact, a Google search of the phrase “Zappos Tour” produces thousands of results, and there are hundreds of YouTube videos chronicling a walk through Zappos.
In addition to tour stories, there are also ample online and offline conversations about the Zappos shuttle service. Roz Searcy, Zappos Kan Du facilitator, shares one such story: “An employee who works in our department went to the airport to pick up a vendor who was running a little behind schedule. Our shuttle driver engaged in a conversation with two ladies who were sitting at the airport waiting for their shuttle. As it turns out, those women had waited for more than two hours to get to their hotel to attend a conference. They also had been treated rudely when they tried to find out what had happened to their shuttle, so our team member just took them to where they needed to go.” Roz notes, “The story keeps going. These ladies sent over thank-you gifts to our employee. One of the women even took time out from her convention to come to Zappos and take a tour while she was in town.”
What relationships matter to your business? Is it only those with customers? Maybe it’s those between your leaders and staff members. Or how about those between staff members and vendors? How much are you investing in creating experiences that personally connect with everyone who has contact with your brand? Many companies spend a great deal on advertising, but they let that advertising down when interactions with the brand fail to demonstrate real caring. At Zappos, as at most great service businesses, authentic relationships are modeled at the seniormost levels of the organization. To last in business today, leaders must understand that people (customers, employees, casually interested parties, and even vendors) have access to instant information and a wide array of choices. As a result, people are unwilling to tolerate being treated like a commodity, an adversary, or a fulfillment object. A brand’s equity is often linked to the openness of its leaders’ communication and the priority that those leaders place on long-term relationships. By seeking connections on all levels, you will experience the lasting benefits of sales, loyalty, and possibly even fanaticism from customers, employees, vendors, and noncustomers alike.
Chapter 7 Ideas to Run With
Leaders are responsible for helping staff members develop their service talent.
Staff members are often more willing to embrace service skill development if they are offered elements of control and have performance evaluations removed from the process.
Wow service stories should be solicited from customers.
Goal setting and diverse sources of feedback aid in the enhancement of complex skills, such as those that are required if you are to secure customer connection and loyalty.
The adage “you get what you measure” is also true for the creation of personal emotional connections, wow, and customer happiness.
Great leaders seek input, seek it regularly, listen, act on what they hear, and loop back what they heard and acted upon.
It’s more likely that you will undercommunicate rather than overcommunicate.
Vendors and noncustomers are people, too. They also desire authentic relationships.
Vendors who are treated like true partners form shared goals with clients and give extra effort to realize those goals.
You can spend money on advertising to create a brand promise and/or spend it to make personal connections through enriched brand experiences.