I’ve made one purchase from Zappos.com.  No local stores had the shoes that I needed (and needed fast) and Zappos came to the rescue.  While I’ll always tell people to Buy Lakeland First, I don’t mind saying it was a phenomenal shopping experience.   They are an internet success story, but the principals Soren Gordhamer took away from a visit with CEO Tony Hsieh and the Zappos staff apply at the brick-and-mortar level just as well:

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1. Your relationships are your brand

The first lesson was on how much they emphasize quality interactions, whether it is engaging with someone on their blog, Twitter, or a vendor. In fact, from their perspective, every interaction impacts how people view their company.

Tony put it this way, “Brand building today is so different than what it was 50 years ago. 50 years ago you could get a few marketing people in a small room and decide, ‘this is what our brand will be’, and then spend a lot of money on TV advertising — and that was your brand. If you as a consumer only had your neighbors to talk to, you had to believe what the TV was telling you. Today anyone, whether it is an employee or a customer, if they have a good or bad experience with your company they can blog about it or Twitter about it and it can be seen by millions of people. It’s what they say now that is your brand.”

Business people in Lakeland tend to know that already.  I don’t care nearly as much about your price as I do who you are and whether or not I know I can trust you to take care of me.  Physical and digital word-of-mouth will speak volumes of your relationships or lack thereof.

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2. Deliver a positive experience

It is of course nice to buy from a company that offers free shipping and a gracious 365-day return policy. These reflect the confidence Zappos has both in their products, but also its trust in people to not take advantage of such a system. A wide selection also helps — their state-of-the-art warehouse in Kentucky has over 1.5 million shoes, and is designed to get shipments to customers as fast as possible.

However, in our time there, we learned that delivering a positive experience extends beyond selection and return policies. We talked to one call rep who spent two-and-a-half hours on the phone with a caller; another spent five hours, both trying to address the caller’s needs. When asked if they got in trouble for spending so much time on the phone with one person, they laughed. They emphasized that their goal is to connect with people who call and to meet their needs. This means that if someone calls for an item that Zappos does not carry, the customer service rep is encouraged to help the person find somewhere online that does carry it. Zappos may not make any money of the sale, but the person goes away with a positive experience.

Do you go out of your way for your customers?  Would you send them to your competitor if, for their specific need, he offered a product that suited them better?  Do you consider customer service a chore or an opportunity to wow a customer?

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3. Embrace transparency

…It’s gonna happen whether you like it or not!

This was one of our favorite points Tony made in our interview. Of course, transparency can take place in many ways. What impressed us in our time at Zappos was how transparent staff were in our discussions. In fact, this openness is a key element at Zappos. Jo Casey, the Help Desk Coordinator emphasized the importance of the freedom to be themselves, saying, “Anyone can do what we do, but nobody can be who we are.”

And let’s face it: when given a chance, you are more apt to work with someone that you know versus a complete stranger. However, people can only get to know us if we let them, if we are transparent, if we bring “who we are” into our work. Tony said in our interview, “I think people worry too much about bringing their personal selves into business, when I think the way to succeed in today’s world is to make your business more personal. Twitter is also a great way of doing that.”

In fact, following Tony’s and other Zappos’ staff tweets, we have noticed that most of them are not about trying to get you to visit Zappos’ website, but focus instead on giving people a chance to get to know them better. And when people know more about you, they feel closer to you, and they have a better sense if they want to do business with you.

If the CEO of one of the largest apparel companies in the world can take the time to answer a customer’s question or tell customers what gets him out of bed in the morning, you can too!

None of these are new concepts, but a good reminder never hurts.  Getting back to the basics of doing business is more important now than ever.

Tags: zappos

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 11:37 am and is filed under Marketing Mondays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.