Доставляя счастье. От нуля до миллиарда

One thing I encourage you to do is to refer back to our core values document and make at least one improvement every week that makes Zappos better. Ideally, we would do this every single day. It sounds daunting, but remember improvements don’t have to be dramatic. Think about what it means to improve just 1% per day and build upon that every single day. Doing so has a dramatic effect and will make us 37x better, not 365% (3.65x) better, at the end of the year.

Wake up every day and ask yourself not only what is the 1% improvement I can change to make Zappos better, but also what is the 1% improvement I can change to make myself better personally and professionally. In the end we, as Zappos, can’t grow unless we, as individuals, grow too.

Imagine yourself making 1% changes every day that compound and consequently make you and Zappos 37x better by the end of the year. Imagine if every employee at Zappos was to do the same. Imagine how much better you, Zappos, and the world will be next year. It won’t be easy and 2009 will no doubt present its own set of challenges, but we positively will get through it. Have a great and happy 2009!

PS: This is for the math geeks. If you start out with $100 at the beginning of the year and you were able to increase what you have by 1% every single day, at the end of the year, you would have $3,778.34 = $100 * (1 + 1%) ^ 365. That is 37.78x what you had at the beginning of the year. Get that 1% every single day! PPS: Yes, I am a math geek. No, I wasn’t cool enough to join the football team, so I joined the math team. Thanks for putting up with me.

Deliver WOW Through Service
At Zappos, anything worth doing is worth doing with WOW.
WOW is such a short, simple word, but it really encompasses a lot of things. To WOW, you must differentiate yourself, which means do something a little unconventional and innovative. You must do something that’s above and beyond what’s expected. And whatever you do must have an emotional impact on the receiver. We are not an average company, our service is not average, and we don’t want our people to be average. We expect every employee to deliver WOW.
Whether internally with co-workers or externally with our customers and partners, delivering WOW results in word of mouth. Our philosophy at Zappos is to WOW with service and experience, not with anything that relates directly to monetary compensation (for example, we don’t offer blanket discounts or promotions to customers).
We seek to WOW our customers, our co-workers, our vendors, our partners, and in the long run, our investors.
Ask yourself: What are things you can improve upon in your work or attitude to WOW more people? Have you WOWed at least one person today?

The initial list had thirty-seven core values:
1. Culture Is Everything
2. WOW/Service
3. Trust and Faith
4. Idealism
5. Company Growth
6. Long Term
7. Personal Growth and Stretching
8. Achieving the Impossible
9. Team
10. Family/Relationships
11. Emotional Connections
12. Developing Your Gut
13. Empowerment
14. Ownership
15. Taking Initiative
16. Doing Whatever It Takes
17. Not Being Afraid to Make Mistakes
18. Unconventional
19. Bottom Up (Meets Top Down)
20. Partnerships
21. Listening
22. Overcommunicate
23. Operational Excellence
24. Built for Change
25. Continuous Incremental Improvement
26. Doing More with Less
27. Innovation
28. Word of Mouth
29. Lucky
30. Passion and Positivity
31. Personality
32. Openness and Honesty
33. Fun
34. Inspirational
35. A Little Weird
36. Willing to Laugh at Ourselves
37. Quiet Confidence and Respect

title. You might be an accountant, or a lawyer, or a software developer-you go through the exact same training program. It’s a 4-week training program, in which we go over company history, the importance of customer service, the long-term vision of the company, our philosophy about company culture-and then you’re actually on the phone for 2 weeks, taking calls from customers. Again, this goes back to our belief that customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company.

At the end of the first week of training, we make an offer to the entire class. We offer everyone $2,000 to quit (in addition to paying them for the time they’ve already worked), and it’s a standing offer until the end of the fourth week of training. We want to make sure that employees are here for more than just a paycheck. We want employees that believe in our long-term vision and want to be a part of our culture. As it turns out, on average, less than 1% of people end up taking the offer.

In most companies, logging in to the computer systems requires a login and password. At Zappos, an additional step is required: a photo of a randomly selected employee is displayed, and the user is given a multiple-choice test to name that employee. Afterward, the profile and bio of that employee are shown, so that everyone can learn more about each other. Although there is no penalty for giving the wrong answer, we do keep a record of everyone’s score. Internally, we refer to this as “The Face Game.”

Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company

1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.

2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary.

3. 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.

4. Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.

5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts.

6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well.

7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize.

8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.

9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service.

10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.

We could have a Zappos library with a couple copies of each of the books so people could check them out?

We didn’t realize it at the time, but the idea of the Zappos library would evolve far beyond just a small set of books that a few employees would read. Five years later, there would be a hundred titles in our lobby available for free to all of our employees and visitors. Many of the books would eventually become required reading for our employees to help them pursue growth and learning, and Zappos would even offer classes to go over some of the more popular books.

“Have you read Good to Great by Jim Collins?” I asked.
“No, is it a good book? I mean… is it a great book?”
“Yeah, you should definitely read it,” I replied. “He talks about what separates the great companies from just the good ones over the long term. One of the things that he found from his research was that great companies have a greater purpose and bigger vision beyond just making money or being number one in a market. A lot of companies fall into the trap of just focusing on making money, and then they never become a great company.”
“Well,” Fred replied, “making money would certainly be a nice problem for us to have right now.”

So my advice is to stop trying to “network” in the traditional business sense, and instead just try to build up the number and depth of your friendships, where the friendship itself is its own reward. The more diverse your set of friendships are, the more likely you’ll derive both personal and business benefits from your friendships later down the road. You won’t know exactly what those benefits will be, but if your friendships are genuine, those benefits will magically appear 2–3 years later down the road.