Delivering Happiness

by Ken Daniels

Tony Hsieh is the CEO of trail-blazing apparel store Zappos.com – the same Zappos that was acquired by Amazon for approximately $1.2 Billion in stock in July 2009.

To cut to the chase, Tony’s book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose should be on the bookshelf (or Kindle/iPad/e-book reader) of every CEO, Director and Manager of not only online businesses, but any business looking to build a team culture working towards the same purpose.

A Customer Service Company That Sell Shoes

Tony places a lot of emphasis on the fact that Zappos’ goal is to delight the customer through amazing customer service. Their philosophy is “We’re a customer service company that sells shoes”.

Customer service is their competitive advantage. But doesn’t every business say that they offer “the best customer service” or something along those lines? Zappos take customer service to another level.

How Zappos Delight Their Customers

Zappos go out of their way to ensure their customers receive only the best customer service. An example from the book:

…most of our efforts on the customer service and customer experience side actually happen after we’ve already made the sale and taken a customer’s credit card number. For example, for most of our loyal and repeat customers, we do surprise upgrades to overnight shipping, even though we only promise them standard ground shipping when they choose the free delivery option.

On empowering their employees to deliver outstanding customer service:

…we don’t measure call times (our longest phone call was almost six hours!), and we don’t upsell. We just care about whether the rep goes above and beyond for every customer. We don’t have scripts because we trust our employees to use their best judgment when dealing with each and every customer. We want our reps to let their true personalities shine during each phone call so that they can develop a personal emotional connection with the customer.

Culture

The second biggest point I took out of Tony’s book was culture.

Tony explains how the culture went downhill at LinkExchange (his first successful company which he sold for $265 million) as the success of the company grew, leading to mornings where getting out of bed to go to work felt like a chore.

With this experience in mind, Tony made sure to put the Zappos team culture at the top of the priority list.

An example of how Tony and the Zappos team treat company culture is demonstrated by the following excerpt from an email sent to all Zappos employees when the company had to lay off 8% of their staff when the financial crisis hit at the end of 2008:

Remember, this is not my company, and this is not our investor’s company. This company is all of ours, and it’s up to all of us where we go from here. The power lies in each and every one of us to move forward and come out as a team stronger than we’ve ever been in the history of the company. Let’s show the world what Zappos is capable of.

Why Zappos Is One Of The Best

I think Zappos’ success is summed up nicely by the following excerpt from the book:

Others can copy our images, our shipping, and the overall look of our website, but they cannot copy our people, our culture or our service.

Buy The Book

You can grab a copy of Delivering Happiness from Fishpond or Amazon. Delivering Happiness is also available on the Kindle Store (if you’ve just picked up an iPad in New Zealand, you can download the free Kindle iPad App and read the book on your iPad for around $20 – cool huh?).