Unlocking The Mystery Of Customer Service

June 15, 2010

Interview with Tony Hsieh, author of the book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

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Mike Carruthers:
People complain a lot about the lack of customer service so why don’t more businesses pay attention to it?

Tony Hsieh:
I think it’s because the pay off is probably usually 2 or 3 years down the lines so it’s more just about weighing what’s going to benefit the bottom line in the short term versus the long term.
 

Tony Hsieh, author of the book Delivering Happiness, is also the CEO of Zappos.com an online retailer of shoes and clothing that has earned a spectacular reputation for customer service.

And for us it was kind of something we accidentally stumbled into but once we communicated that to employees what we found (which we weren’t expecting at all) was that employees were suddenly a lot more engaged and passionate about the company. And when customers called they could sense that the person on the other end of the phone wasn’t’ there just for a paycheck but really wanted to deliver great service.

Of course providing great customer service costs money so how did Zappos do it and still stay profitable?

Well our whole philosophy is to take most of the money that we would have spent on marketing and instead invest it into the customer experience. So by really investing into the customer experience let the customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.

And it seems to be working. You’ve probably heard the business theory that it’s a lot cheaper to keep an existing customer than to go out and get a new one.

Today on any given day about 75% of our orders are from repeat customers.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here