This isn’t a traditional business book by any means
In Delivering Happiness you get to experience the ups and downs that all small business owners know to be part of the lifestyle they have chosen.
Zappos
While Zappos may not be a small business today, it tries very hard to maintain the entrepreneurial ways that served it well from the beginning. You will learn how Tony Hsieh (Shay) and his team progressively built a culture that is happiness-centric, and often a little weird – and even how things like weirdness intentionally became part of the culture.
- Pay Brand new employees $2000 to quit
- Make customer service the entire responsibility of the company
- Focus on company culture as the Number 1 priority
He acknowledges that the success of Zappos was largely due to three basic concepts that they focused on until they got them right. The three dynamics are:
- Brand,
- Culture, and
- Pipeline, better known as simply BCP.
The Zappos Brand is all about customer service. The secret of making this very ordinary condition a differentiating factor is to break all the rules about how you serve customers.
10 ways to instil customer service
- Make customer service a priority
- Make WOW a verb
- Empower and trust your customer service reps.
- It’s ok 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 1800 numbers
- View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand not as an expense you’re seeking to minimise
- Have the entire company celebrate great service tell stores 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
Tony Hseieh
Tony Hseieh (CEO of Zappos) tells the story of how his life became entangled with the life of Zappos. Because he was bored, he and his roommate created Link Exchange which they eventually sold to Microsoft for $265 million. He tells the story of when he realised he was going to sell the company because he dreaded the thought of going into work, into his own company. Bored again, this is where Zappos enters his life. Much of the rest of the book is a history of how Zappos evolved and grew from nothing to $1 billion in gross sales in less than 10 years. He realised he was passionate about building a company, and the beneficiary of his passion happened to be Zappos. He poured a lot of his own money into keeping Zappos alive and learned lessons about inventory, warehousing, and outsourcing.
Zappos Core values
- Deliver wow through service
- Embrace and drive change
- Create fun and a little weirdness
- Be adventurous creative and open minded
- Pursue growth and learning
- Build open and honest relationships with communications
- Build a positive team and family spirit
- Do more with less
- Be passionate and determined
- Be humble
The Zappos Culture is created from those ten core values. The secret is not the core values, but actually making them part of the fibre of the company.
