Summary: Delivering Happiness Tony Hsieh

It’s been interesting to look at the evolution of the Zappos brand promise over the years:
1999 -Largest selection of shoes
2003 – Customer service
2005 – Culture and core values as our platform
2007 – Personal emotional connection
2009 – Delivering happiness.”

purpose to a single statement: Zappos is about delivering happiness to the world.

“If you have more than 3 priorities then you don’t have any.”

View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re trying to minimize.
Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.
Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service.
Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.

Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.
Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary.
Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service – because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare.
Realize it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.
Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts.
Don’t hide your 1-800 number.

When customers call looking for a specific item that Zappos is out of stock on, service reps are trained to research at least three competitor Web sites to see if they have the item in stock. If they do, the customer is directed to buy from the competitor.

“Over the years, the number one driver of our growth at Zappos has been repeat customers and word of mouth. Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.”

“Our philosophy at Zappos is that we’re willing to make short-term sacrifices (including lost revenue or profits) if we believe that the long-term benefits are worth it. Protecting the company culture and sticking to core values is a long-term benefit.”