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The holiday season certainly brings customer service to the forefront of our thinking, but excellent service is needed 24/7/365 in order to have a successful business. Therefore, in today’s Advisor, we continue our discussion of what makes great customer service—year-round.
It’s not about shoes, says Internet shoe company Zappos’ CEO, Tony Hsieh. It’s about stories. 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.
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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:
- They have strong cultures.
- 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.
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 from the UPS hub.)
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Top 10
Here are Hsieh’s top 10 ways to instill customer service in your company:
- 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 that 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 800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well.
- View each call as an investment in building customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking 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.
Getting employees to follow policies and procedures is a challenge (if you’re not Zappos) and you know the solution—train, train, and train. Make customer service a year-round priority for both internal and external customers.