If you haven’t heard of Zappos where have you been?
The name has come to stand for a new standard of customer service, an awesome (I can use this as they are American) online shopping experience, a great place to work, and the most impressive transformational business success story of our time.
Their approach quite simply is “To make every day a WOW day for your customers, staff and bottom line”. Well this is what the copy on ‘The Zappos Experience’ book cover said. Excluding the word ‘awesome’ as I added that instead of amazing. Similar I figured.
It really is a phenomenally smart business and a fascinating book to read. Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO writes the foreword and explains that they have made a lot of mistakes along the way and part of the goals of the book was to help other companies make fewer mistakes. Their vision has evolved to helping other companies and organisations make their customers and employees happy as well as their own. Nice people.
Described as UNCONVENTIONAL you get the feeling very quickly that everything about the way they do business is singularly focused. They have one culture and that centres wholeheartedly on SERVICE.
After screening suitable job candidates based on cultural fit the culture at Zappos is constantly nurtured. This is done in three ways:
- Incorporating values into regular progress conversations
- Budgeting money for cultural activities
- Encouraging open expression of opinions about culture
Whether you buy in to the clearly American hyped energy around this business one thing is for sure. Both customers and employees love Zappos. It stands for everything good, even if occasionally things go bad, because everyone wants it to be good. Awesome!
Get in touch to give your business a touch of Zappos