Zappos: Creating Great Customer Experiences
We recently spoke with Jon Wolske, Zappos Culture Evangelist, to learn about how Zappos became a successful company by focusing on the happiness of their employees and customers.
Zappos didn’t initially start off providing amazing customer service experience. In 1999, during the beginning stages of the company, Zappos only sold shoes on their site but as their company began to offer a wider selection of products, they started to focus more on people. Their goal became providing a great experience for their customers which, according to Jon, eventually became their “why,” which works well to this very day.
By 2005, Zappos started to clearly define its company culture and truly discovered their identity. Their mission statement, also referred to by their employees as their ‘WOW’ philosophy, is “to provide the best customer service possible.”
The Zappos ‘WOW’ customer experience starts with going above and beyond for their customers, regardless of what is normally expected of their roles. Although Zappos sells products that you can find anywhere on the internet, the customer experience that they provide is what makes them so uniquely special. For example, when a customer speaks to a Zappos customer service representative, also referred to as “Zapponians,” the rep will listen intently and try to unearth a deeper reason as to why the customer is looking for a specific product (e.g., birthdays, weddings). By doing so, Zappos believes that they can better satisfy the customer service needs and the emotional needs of their patrons, and ultimately provide a much better experience.
Whether a customer is looking for an outfit for an upcoming wedding or even searching for a discontinued product, customer experience representatives are encouraged to search high and low to locate the product and help deliver it to the customer. There have even been instances where a Zappos experience representative helped locate a sweater on another website because Zappos did not carry it. Why would anyone do that?
The customer called looking for a very specific sweater. As the conversation went on, the Zappos representative learned that the customer, a mother of two boys, was looking for her older son’s favorite sweater to give to her younger son after the older son passed away. The problem was that the sweater got discontinued.
It wasn’t easy to find online and it wasn’t available on the Zappos website. Rather than tell the customer that they don’t have it and that’s that, the representative did everything they could to locate the sweater online. Since Zappos couldn’t order it and sell it, the representative requested to hold the sweater for the mother so that she could purchase it directly. Although Zappos would lose that transaction, that wasn’t what it’s all about; Zappos’ primary goal is to always provide “the best customer experience possible,” regardless of the outcome.
Another customer once published a blog post about how she used Zappos as her personal assistant for one week, where she called Zappos’ customer service and asked for things completely unrelated to their business. Most other customer reps would flounder yet Zappos’ customer experience representatives went ahead and helped her accomplish her tasks despite no immediate benefits for Zappos. Unbeknownst to Zappos, the customer’s website is a famous fashion blog with over a million followers on social media.
At the end of this experience, the online post detailing the customer experience about other random questions, such as favorite artichoke dip recipe, provided an unexpected ‘return on investment’ from the publicity and exposure. These are only a few instances that reveal their unrivaled customer service experience that Zappos provides to its customers.
What can companies learn from Zappos and creating exceptional customer service experiences? First, identify who your customers are and whom you are serving (e.g., employees, partners, vendors, and customers). To create that ‘WOW’ experience for customers, it’s about everyone in the company committing to making changes in the way they conduct business. If the people in your organization are doing small things in the right direction daily, you will notice a positive difference in a year. It’s not about one large ‘wow’ effect once in a while; it happens in the daily interactions you with people.
We would like to thank Zappos Insights and Jon Wolske for sharing stories and examples of exceptional customer experiences with us.
