People “get” what you’re feeling—consciously or not. If you don’t really care about your customers, they’ll be the first ones to know.
Great brands don’t just create meaningless slogans like “Customer Service Excellence”—they champion customer-centric values as a way of operating every aspect of their business.
These businesses excite us and make us happy to conduct business with them. It’s a symbiotic relationship between business and customer. The business provides products and services customers need and, in turn, the customers willingly patronize the business and support its existence.
Have many companies forgotten about the nature of business itself?
Outstanding businesses go above and beyond to better their customers’ lives:
L.L. Bean wants you to be completely satisfied with your purchase. Don’t like the way a shirt holds up after a few years of use? Return it—L.L. Bean has no time limit on customer satisfaction.
Online retailer Zappos offers free shipping both ways and a 365-day return policy.
Along with one-click shopping, Amazon offers a Prime program that gives customers free 2-day shipping on most items and their Subscribe and Save feature offers both convenient and economical shopping.
In addition to creating beautifully-designed products, Apple supports their Mac User Groups (MUGs) and Genius Bar to help educate their customers on how to better use their Apple products.
Harley-Davidson sponsors HOG groups around the world and annual mega-rally events.
Search and online advertising giant Google offers a robust offering of free services that help their customers in their daily lives from Google Reader, Google-411, Desktop Search, Google Earth, News Alerts, Google Calendar and Google Docs.
What does your business do to better serve its customers?
“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
- His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama
Apparently, kindness is also the religion of online retailer Zappos.com.
Companies that uphold Cult-Brand values expect the best from their employees, because as humans, they have the intrinsic capacity to feel, contribute, and most of all, love.
At Zappos, Thursday is Random Acts of Kindness Day. Every week, three people are randomly selected to be the recipient of his or her own hit parade, complete with noisemakers, bullhorns, a royal banner and crown to be donned for the entire week.
Kindness also spreads throughout the corridors of Zappos through song. Take a listen to the Zappettes, Zappos’s female singing sensation, uplifting co-workers’ spirits in three-part harmony.
And when employees are inspired to spread kindness among each other, customers will be touched with the same.
1999: Selection (of shoes)
2003: Customer Service
2005: Culture and Core Values as their Platform
2007: Personal Emotional Connection
2009: Delivering Happiness
Several key take-aways for smart business people:
A strong brand is constantly evolving, but not changing directions. This is critical. You probably don’t want or need to re-invent your brand, but you also can’t be stagnant. (It’s also interesting to see how a brand’s logo can evolve over time.)
Strong brands tend to move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. Zappos continues to move in a more humanistic direction. They’ve always been about people, but now they are moving upward to a more meaningful connection with their customers and employees. Delivering happiness is a tall order, but simply holding that intention will create new opportunities to wow their customers and employees and lead to greater loyalty.
For anyone interested in the power of brand loyalty and how to build a business for the long-term, Zappos is an ideal company to study. Zappos demonstrates that many of the intangible qualities of business like values, culture and willingness are more important than many transactional-oriented executives care to believe. Otherwise, why would anyone care about a shoe e-tailer? And how could they grow by approximately 7,800% annually for the last nine years?
Jim Collins in Good to Great, clearly spelled out the attributes of great leaders. Level 5 leaders, as Collins calls them, exemplify a seemingly incongruous mix of personal humility and professional will.
Humility + Will = Level 5
“Level 5 Leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless,” Collins explains. They don’t allow their egos to interfere with their primary focus on the larger goal of building a great company. Collins clarifies that Level 5 leaders are usually highly ambitious, but their ambition is directed for the good of the institution, not themselves.
At Zappos, you won’t find any sacrosanct corner offices reserved for the higher ups. Zappos executives are fondly referred to as “Monkeys” and sit in what is aptly named “Monkey Row.” Here, CEO Tony Hsieh sits in an open cubicle among other executives, and encourages his employees to throw peanut shells on the floor of his workspace. Hsieh sends a subtle yet clear message that he’s not more important than anyone else in the company.
Collins further explains, “The good-to-great leaders never wanted to become larger-than-life heroes. They never aspired to be put on a pedestal or become unreachable icons. They were seemingly ordinary people quietly producing extraordinary results.” Aligned with this core principle, Hsieh openly advertises his email address and encourages people to drop him a message. You might be skeptical, thinking that your message would go unanswered, lost in a flood of emails. Hsieh, however, means what he says and stands by his word.
How can a CEO of a billion dollar company be so responsive? According to Collins, it’s because Level 5 leaders have a “ferocious resolve” to do whatever it takes to make the company great. And by his very nature, Hsieh embodies the perfect balance between personal humility and professional will, leading Zappos’s transformation into the great company it is today.
Can you imagine a day at the office where you might be asked to shave the head of your co-worker? Or better yet, how about taking a razor to the mane of your CEO? Leave it to the folks at Zappos to create not just a day, but an annual event called the Bald & Blue Head Shaving Day.
Social grooming is a means through which animals, including humans, who live in proximity can bond, build and reinforce social relationships. CEO Tony Hsieh explained that what originally started out as a dare evolved into a fun team building activity. Now every year, Zapponians line up and get groomed, all in the name of team spirit.
The benefits? Research has shown that social grooming is positively associated with relationship satisfaction and trust. For Zappos, relationships built on trust are the bedrock of their organization.
Watch this short clip on social grooming, the Zappos way.
Jobs are everywhere. We clock in and clock out, putting in the bare minimum just to get the work done. Sometimes though, we find a career where we have a deeper vested interest in our work, motivated by achievement and advancement. Yet if we’re lucky, we’ll eventually find our calling where work becomes our life mission, and our life mission becomes work.
Online retailer Zappos is on a mission to inspire their family of employees to a higher calling. Since the beginning, they weren’t satisfied hiring people just looking for a job to pay the bills. Under their visionary leader Tony Hsieh, the company made a bold organizational move in 1994, relocating their headquarters from San Francisco to Las Vegas, to align themselves with people looking for a career.
Hsieh wrote in Inc. Magazine, “We were having a hard time finding good customer service people in San Francisco. Las Vegas has a lot of call centers and lots of people who want to do customer service as a career.”
Zappos embraces a singular vision—to provide the best customer service—and attracts people who share this passion. But the folks at Zappos aren’t satisfied knowing that their employees are committed to a career in customer service. They constantly strive to inspire their employees to find their true calling—to find personal meaning in their work guided by a higher purpose.
To achieve this, Zappos employs a full-time on-site personal coach, Dr. Vik, who invites employees to take a seat on the royal “throne” for a one-on-one consultation. He regularly tells his guests, “You are worth a billion dollars. Come have a seat and take your life to the next level!” With Dr. Vik’s guidance, employees are empowered to reach their full potential across their work and personal lives.
How many companies employ a full-time personal coach? Most businesses would view this as an unnecessary expense and immediately reject the idea.
Yet Zappos understands that a company’s employees—their people—are a reflection of the brand itself. When employees find their true calling, work is greatly satisfying and meaningful. Their enthusiasm and passion is infectious. And the customers are first to take notice.
Businesses aggressively strive to establish trust with their customers, but oftentimes neglect the need to cultivate trust in their own workplaces. Economist John Helliwell researched the determinants of workplace happiness, and found that trust is the greatest contributor, beating out pay, workload, or perks. A one-point increase on the trust scale can mean the equivalent of the psychological benefits associated with a 40% wage increase.
Online retailer Zappos embraces trust as an essential ingredient in cultivating an enthusiastic and happy workplace. Zappos made its inaugural debut at #23 on Fortune Magazine’s List of “100 Best Companies to Work for,” making them the highest-ranking initiate for 2009. For Zappos, trust is a core business value, established through a steadfast commitment to transparency.
Here are 5 ways that Zappos champions trust within their organization:
The Culture Book: Zappos publishes an annual book, a compilation of employees’ thoughts and reflections on the Zappos culture. Every submission is included and edited only for spelling and typos. The book is given to potential hires for an unfiltered look into the Zappos culture, inclusive of the good, the bad, and the beautiful.
The “Ask Anything” Newsletter: Employees can literally ask anything about the company, even and especially about financials. Answers are compiled and published in a monthly newsletter.
Extranet for Vendors: Vendors can log in and view insider data such as inventories and sales. When asked if Zappos worries whether the information will get into the hands of competitors, CEO Tony Hsieh is not concerned. He is confident that the benefits outweigh the risks, by providing vendors a critical window into their business, promoting a sense of control, and above all else, building relationships based on trust.
Company Tours–Come One, Come All: Zappos has an open door policy and offers everyone a tour of their company headquarters. When reporters visit the headquarters, there’s no official algorithm that dictates who they can speak to and who they cannot. When you have nothing to hide, every employee is authorized to speak to his or her own experience.
Twitter: Zappos actively encourages its employees to join Twitter, and in fact, offers Twitter class as part of their employee orientation. With over 400 employees tweeting, Zappos policy is more of a non-policy: “Be real and use your best judgment.” Hsieh understands the power of Twitter, not just as a way to cultivate transparency, but also to empower employees and strengthen ties within the organization. Hsieh tweeted: “Twittering is like hugging. Just because it’s hard to measure the return on investment doesn’t mean there isn’t value there.”
When employees feel trusted, they tend to be happier. The pay off for companies? Greater productivity and less turnover. And when employees are satisfied, customers tend to be satisfied too. So what do you have to hide?
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, knows a thing or two about the power of word of mouth. In the beginning, Hsieh made a critical decision to invest the majority of his marketing and advertising budget into the customer experience.
Over 80 percent of Zappos customers hear about the brand through word of mouth or online advertising. Once customers place their first order and experience Zappos’s stellar customer service, they usually come again.
Today, 75 percent of sales come from repeat customers. And it’s those happy customers who gladly share their enthusiasm about the brand with others.
What’s makes Zappos talk worthy? Zappos loves their customers and will go to great lengths to make them happy. Here, “P-E-C” or “Personal Emotional Connection” with the customer reigns.
Customer loyalty reps send hundreds of thank you cards to customers every week—not the automated email variety, but personalized notes handwritten on paper.
While most companies would see this as an unnecessary expense, Zappos understands the value of building relationships with its customers.
Chris Robert, assistant professor of management at the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Robert J. Trulaske Sr. College of Business, studied the effects of humor in the workplace. While it’s an axiom that a happy workplace boosts morale, Robert found that humor is positively associated with workplace performance and employee retention.
Robert explains, “If you have positive emotions about your job, you’re less likely to quit. You might get a better job offer, but it will take more to draw you away when you like where you work and you like the people you work with.”
Great companies like online retailer Zappos intuitively understands the power of humor and its ability to ease stressful situations, build rapport and foster cohesiveness within the workplace. At any moment during the workday, the folks at Zappos might spontaneously rally around a friendly Oreo-eating competition, or a “Chubby Bunny Contest.” How many marshmallows can you fit into your mouth?
At Zappos, you might also be a contender in their Thumb Wars competition, or have as much fun watching it on the sidelines:
While these antics might be grounds for termination at your average corporation, Zappos encourages its employees to create fun and a little weirdness. In fact, it’s third on their top-ten-list of core values.
In Zappos’s eyes, employees are not just goofing off and wasting time. This is a valued and expected part of their workday. When humor infuses the workplace, it becomes a breeding ground for happiness, productivity, creativity and innovation. And when employees are feeling positive, customers are the first to take notice.
How far are you willing to go to help your customers get what they want?
Zappos will check other retailers for a customer if the merchandise is out of stock and refer them to a competitor. You can be sure that customer will come back to Zappos again and tell all her friends, because Zappos always makes sure she gets what she needs.
In Quest for the Best, Stanley Marcus, the former chairman of Neiman Marcus, descrbes an encounter with a customer he ran into at the symphony: The customer told Marcus that his pipe stem broke, but that Neiman Marcus was not getting anymore for 3 months. The next day Marcus called the buyer, found out that was untrue. When the man got to his office, he found a message that Neiman Marcus was delivering a replacement by noon.
A month later the man purchased a $50,000 diamond ring.
Exceeding customers’ expectations by delivering great service reaps great rewards.
How far do you go to meet and exceed your customers’ needs?
People “get” what you’re feeling—consciously or not. If you don’t really care about your customers, they’ll be the first ones to know.
“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
At the 
Jim Collins in 
