HR Management & Compliance

Zappos Is NOT About Shoes—Top 10 Ways to Great Customer Service

It’s not about shoes, says Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, it’s about stories. (See yesterday’s issue for a great Zappos’ customer service story.) It’s about creating more memories, says Hsieh.

Hsieh uses the Las Vegas example of Cirque du Soleil. They totally redefined circus with their extraordinary sets and movements, but they didn’t get there by doing the usual customer service questionnaires. If you were a typical circus owner and took the traditional improvement route, you’d ask customers questions like, “Were the elephants to your satisfaction?” “Should we add another elephant?”

Using that approach, Hsieh says, you would be able to make incremental improvements to your circus. But you’d never get to Cirque du Soliel that way.

It’s About Culture

Hsieh recommends two management books, Good to Great by Jim Collins and Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright. By the way, Zappos thinks so highly of Tribal Leadership that they offer the book as a free audio download from their website.

The common thread in the books is that successful companies have two things in common:

  1. They have strong cultures
  2. They have a vision with a higher purpose.

They are not about profits, but the culture and the vision enable them to generate profits, Hsieh says.

Or, to put it another way, Hsieh says, brand is a lagging indicator of culture. To demonstrate how Zappos lets culture dictate operations, he notes that the company does not measure call times of representatives. Other companies time calls and work to reduce average call times. Not at Zappos. They recently recorded a record-breaking call time of about 8 hours, Hsieh says.


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Warehouse 24/7 Not the Most Efficient

Culture extends to the warehouse operations. Keeping the warehouse open 24/7 isn’t the most efficient way to run it, Hsieh says. It’s more efficient to let orders pile up and then the picker can pick more orders in his or her trip through the aisles. But we’re not about maximizing warehouse efficiency, we’re about customer service, Hsieh says. And customers are wowed when they order at midnight and the shoes arrive about 8 hours later.

(It doesn’t hurt, he says, that their warehouse is 15 minutes form the UPS hub.)

Hsieh’s Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service in Your Company

  1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.
  2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary.
  3. 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.
  4. Realize that it’s okay to “fire” customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.
  5. Don‘t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts.
  6. Don’t hide your 800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well.
  7. View each call as an investment in building customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize.
  8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.
  9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service.
  10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.

Getting employees to follow policies and procedures is a challenge (if you’re not Zappos) and you know the solution—train, train, and train.

Training is critical, but it’s tough to fit it in. To train effectively, you need a program that’s easy for you to deliver and that requires little time from busy schedules. Also, if you’re like most companies in these tight budget days, you need a program that’s reasonable in cost.

We asked our editors what they recommend for training supervisors in a minimum amount of time with maximum effect. They came back with BLR’s unique 10-Minute HR Trainer.


Train your line managers with BLR’s 10-Minute HR Trainer. There won’t be time for classroom boredom. Try it for free.


As its name implies, this product trains managers and supervisors in critical HR skills in as little as 10 minutes for each topic. 10-Minute HR Trainer offers these features:

Trains in 50 key HR topics under all major employment laws, including manager and supervisor responsibilities, and how to legally carry out managerial actions from hiring to termination. (See a complete list of topics below.)

Uses the same teaching sequence master teachers use. Every training unit includes an overview, bullet points on key lessons, a quiz, and a handout to reinforce the lesson later.

Completely prewritten and self-contained. Each unit comes as a set of reproducible documents. Just make copies or turn them into overheads, and you’re done. (Take a look at a sample lesson below.)

Updated continually. As laws change, your training needs to do so as well. 10-Minute HR Trainer provides new lessons and updated information every 90 days, along with a monthly Training Forum newsletter, for as long as you are in the program.

Works fast. Each session is so focused that there’s not a second’s waste of time. Your managers are in and out almost before they can look at the clock, yet they remember small details even months later.

Evaluate It at No Cost for 30 Days

We’ve arranged to make 10-Minute HR Trainer available to our readers for a 30-day, in-office, no-cost trial. Review it at your own pace and try some lessons with your colleagues. If it’s not for you, return it at our expense. Click here and we’ll set you up with 10-Minute HR Trainer.

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