Читать книгу The Power of WOW - The Employees of Zappos.com - Страница 14

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Jeff Lewis

Customer Service Technology

I once received a call from a customer asking about our “Joke of the Day.” He explained that he was a janitorial supervisor at the McMurdo Research Station—in Antarctica, of all places—and that every Monday, his team would call in to our main line during their weekly meeting to listen to our Joke of the Day. He said that our jokes were the highlight of the meeting for his staff, and that they wanted to know if they might be able to contribute some jokes. We took them up on it, and a week later we started playing the jokes they had sent over.

Roughly a month after this interaction, we received a large box full of candy from the McMurdo janitorial staff, filled with all kinds of candy from around the world. It took so long to get here from Antarctica that some of the candy was expired by the time it arrived, but the goodwill shown by the McMurdo team has always stuck with me.

Loren Becker

Community Team

I have webbed feet.

It was one of our employees who came up with the idea to offer a “Joke of the Day” option on our customer service line, and it’s been going on for years now: Anyone who calls in can opt to be taken to the “Joke of the Day” before getting connected to CLT, if they so choose.

Um, Loren . . . I think it was, um, my idea, derived from my childhood shenanigan history of calling 976-JOKE without realizing the calls were not free. In my book Delivering Happiness, I wrote:

I asked if anyone had heard of 976 numbers. I had seen all sorts of ads on TV for different 976 numbers. You could call 976-JOKE, for example, to hear the joke of the day, at the cost of 99 cents a call. So we tried calling 976-JOKE, and heard a joke that wasn’t very funny. We tried calling the number again to try to get a better joke, and all they did was replay the same one. In retrospect, I guess it made sense since it was supposed to be the joke of the day, not the joke of the minute.

It wasn’t a marketing idea. It wasn’t designed to make calls shorter to keep our 800-number budget down (obviously, since it makes calls longer). It doesn’t result in increased purchases, at least not directly. It was just something fun to do. A way to let customers know that we’re a unique, fun place to call in to, and maybe even a way to relieve some tension if whoever’s calling is having a bad day—which might include the fact that something was wrong with their order and they’re now spending their valuable time calling customer service at Zappos.

The thing is, we’re quirky here, and we want you to know it.

Our employees have the freedom to tell jokes, to send cards, to send gifts, to talk to callers or vendors or contractors for hours and hours if they strike up a good conversation. They have the freedom to be themselves. And freedom is a pretty rare thing in the workplace, isn’t it?

When people come to tour our Downtown Las Vegas campus—and they do come, in the thousands, it’s crazy!—they’re excited by what they see. Like, the bar we built right next to the lobby, or employees playing video games and Skee-Ball in the company arcade in the middle of the day. They see employees stopping by the convenience store in our lobby, picking up some random item they forgot at home and need now, and they wish they could do that at their own places of work.

which also happens to be the former Las Vegas City Hall

The freedom and autonomy we give to our employees isn’t frivolous. It’s purposeful. We want everyone here to know that they are allowed to use their best judgment, to do things on their own without asking permission. That they can take a risk and try new ideas without feeling like, “Oh, if I take this risk and it doesn’t work out, I could get fired.”

If we were a brand-new start-up, I think you could write off our quirky ways and dismiss them as something that wouldn’t work anywhere else, and our critics certainly did that in our early days. But we’ve been around long enough now to have a meaningful track record, and I think more and more people are taking a look at this level of freedom we offer our staff and thinking, “Huh. Maybe there’s something to all of that.”

The freedom of expression and overall autonomy that’s such a part of our culture isn’t just important in the workplace. It’s important to how we provide service to our customers. We know for a fact (because we’ve occasionally tried regulating things in ways that weren’t “us”) that if we get too uptight or too stuffy or too regulated, then our Customer Loyalty Team, the people on the phones—the front line that shares experiences with our customers—won’t provide the same energy. If they’re unhappy, if they’re feeling stuffy, then they come off as unhappy and stuffy on the phone. On the other hand, if they’ve just come back from our company-wide Taco Tuesday, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, thanks for calling. How was your day?” The energy you get from the office is translated to the customer. It all comes full circle.

That’s not to say that we don’t have any rules here. We have guidelines. I mean, you don’t let cars drive on the left side of the road, right? There are speed limits. There are definitely guidelines in life that help everyone enjoy their freedom without getting run off the road and wrecking each other’s cars. And those guidelines change and shift and adapt over time, for sure. When I started on the phones fourteen years ago, there was a slight bit more freedom to give stuff away, or the feeling of, “Man, if they have the slightest issue, let’s comp those shoes!” Our volume is so big now, we’ve had to pull back slightly on that one particular freedom we give to our CLT workers. But the last time I was back on the phones for a couple of hours, I gave a lady a pair of shoes during one conversation because it was the right thing to do. It’s just that not every customer service call warrants that big of a response. A coupon or a simple replacement-exchange, or even just some kindness and understanding, goes a long way. But I can’t think of a single time or a single way in which we’ve pulled back our employees’ freedom to make choices and “do the right thing” themselves in any major way, in all these years.

As long as we stick to our core values and keep service first in everything we do, everything works out. Truly. Everything. Even if something goes wrong in the short term, in the long run? This formula works, and it works really well.

Kelly Smith

Experimental Marketing and Brand Strategy

I once got to hold a human brain! It was one of the strangest and coolest experiences I’ve ever had.

I like to think of responsibility as “response-ability”—the ability to respond. We give each of our employees true decision-making power, allowing them to lead with their hearts and show empathy by engaging with customers as trusted representatives of our company. There truly is no script. When it comes to making the right decision, we encourage our employees to go with their gut and to always “do the right thing,” without having to ask a manager or go through some committee before they do it. On the phones, that means giving customers free or reduced-price merchandise to make up for unforeseen errors, or sometimes just to put smiles on their faces. It could mean sending cards or flowers to customers who need a pick-me-up. We budget for all of that because we know it’s important. Not just because it feels good and makes our customers feel good, but because it’s good for the business.

A little empathy goes a long way, and our customer loyalty numbers bear that out. We track comments across all sorts of social media to measure Zappos promotors versus detractors online, and while our industry usually gets around 60 percent positive responses, we routinely score around 90 percent positive. We have an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau, too. And in our own internal surveys, we routinely find that more than 98 percent of customers “feel that the Zappos family member you interacted with genuinely cares about you and your reason for contacting us.”

Genuinely! We look for employees who genuinely care, who want to make the world a better place—and providing positive customer experiences actually does make the world a better place.

Somewhere along the line, customer service departments developed a bad reputation. In my opinion, far too many companies made the poor decision to chase short-term profits instead of the long-term gains of treating customers the way they themselves would want to be treated. And the result is that people all across America are ready for a fight every time they have to pick up a phone and ask for help, even when they paid good money for something and the company on the other end of the line is clearly at fault for not delivering what was promised. (Is there anyone who hasn’t had a lousy customer service experience with the cable company, or an airline, or some other big industry we depend on to deliver services we need to function at home and at work?)

A lousy customer service call can ruin your whole day. We all know that.

Lauren Pappert

Customer Loyalty Team

I once got a call from a customer who mentioned he was a comedian performing in Washington, DC. Before jumping into the order, I asked him, “Are you funny?” I was trying to be the lovable heckler–type but I don’t think my delivery was on point. He laughed it off and said he hoped he was funny because he was going onstage soon. As he placed his order, I soon realized he was a famous comedian who has starred in many of my favorite movies. Awkward! Turned out he couldn’t get an order delivered to the hotel in time for his Saturday show, so he wanted to cancel the order. In true Zappos fashion, I let him know we would find a way to get them there. We searched high and low and found the exact same shoe available on Amazon with Saturday delivery. He was ecstatic and placed the order online before we even hung up! Zappos may not have delivered his shoes, but we delivered a lighthearted conversation, a solution focused around his needs, and happiness.

I’m hoping he put on a really good show that night and made a whole lot of people smile—and I love imagining that maybe our exchange played a tiny role in that.

But a great customer service call? With someone who genuinely cares and who’s empowered to take care of you the way you ought to be taken care of? That can make your whole day better. And people who are treated right usually let their family and friends know about it. They come back as repeat customers, in a big way. (That’s not conjecture. We’ve measured it. In the next chapter, our COO will explain just how big that return on investment is.) And they often find themselves paying it forward.

No joke: Kindness is contagious!

Check out these stories (in the blue boxes) from actual calls with Zappos customers to get a sense of what I mean.

Hollie Delaney

Chief Human Resources Officer

I’m a huge Vegas Golden Knights hockey fan! I go to all the home games and lots of the away games.

It all goes back to trust. At Zappos, we manage the 95 percent of people who are going to do things right. In other companies, HR is all about managing the 5 percent who are going to do things wrong, and making sure you’re covered for that 5 percent, which means you’re automatically assuming that basically everyone is going to do things wrong.

It’s a totally different approach here. We actually trust that people are going to do the right thing. We start out assuming positive intent, which means we don’t have to put many rules and policies in place at all. And guess what? I don’t see any more issues or any more complaints here than I did in a company with all sorts of traditional rules in place. I’ve done the metrics to compare, like “How many complaints have I gotten?” or “How many issues did I have in the old world of HR versus how many issues have I had here?” And there are actually fewer issues here than when we had all of the policies and procedures in place in my old jobs.

Jeff Espersen

Head of Merchandising

One time during the holidays, this lady called in screaming at me because her packages were stolen. I had to hold the phone out at arm’s length until she gave me a moment to speak. This lady was ready for a fight, and I think if I were working at some other company I might have cut her off and started questioning her: “Do you have any proof they were stolen? How do I know this isn’t fraud and you just want more boots?” (She was saying that three pairs of boots had been stolen from the spot where the delivery service had left them.)

But this is Zappos. Our company trusts us to do the right thing, and we in turn trust that our customers aren’t trying to rip us off, either. So I said, “Okay, I’m so sorry to hear they were stolen. Do you have the order information at all? Do you know what was on there? Let’s see if we have those in stock.” I just took care of her and sent her new stuff for free. She did not expect that. Toward the end of the call she said, “Wow, that was . . . that was easy.”

She was so happy to know that the replacements for her stolen boots were on the way, it made up for every bit of anger she was feeling. And I have no doubt she told everyone she knows that story. And I bet she still tells that story whenever she wears those boots.

What did that cost us? Not much in the big scheme of things. But that good will goes a long way. Even I felt better after that call, like I’d done something nice and made someone’s day a whole lot better.

We trust that people are going to do the right thing. We start out assuming positive intent, which means we don’t have to put many rules and policies in place at all.

So instead of spending 95 percent of my time catering to compliance issues in order to deal with the five-percenters, I spend almost all of my time here working on the more important thing, which is how to make this company be a place where employees want to work.

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