Posts Tagged ‘zappos’

Lean Business: Do Unto Others*

Mike | April 1st, 2013

The golden rule of word-of-mouth marketing: Be nice to thine customers and, lo, they shall be nice to you in return. The mechanical nuts and bolts behind this idea, in social psychology terminology, is represented by the concept of reciprocity. In short it referes to how people respond to a positive action with another positive action. [...]

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Book Review: Delivering Happiness by Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh

Ross | June 9th, 2010

Over the past year, I’ve been fortunate to talk with Tony Hsieh (Zappos CEO) and Alfred Lin (Zappos COO/CFO), about ways that Zappos grew its culture and its phenomenal customer service. Most people don’t know that Zappos had a very turbulent history when it was founded, or about the many personal sacrifices that Tony Hsieh [...]

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Ideas for small business and startups: Value Disciplines

Mike | October 13th, 2009

Graduate school was one of the great times of my life: studying something that I absolutely wanted to study and surrounded by a group of folks who felt exactly the same way. Two years in business school went by with rocket-speed, but some of the ideas took root and continue to have an impact on [...]

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Do I HAVE to wear boots to a Bootcamp?

Jerome | July 3rd, 2009

One of my favorite companies in the world – Zappos – is planning a two day Zappos Bootcamp. At first, I got excited because one could never own enough boots, and Zappos certainly has one of the largest inventories of boots in the universe (or at least on Earth). I thought this would be a [...]

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The Culture of Customer Service

Jerome | December 19th, 2008

Ross recently wrote a post about talking with people, not to them. When it comes to customer service, many people forget this lesson. It’s simple. Customer service is first being human. Great customer service means listening, talking with customers, fixing what doesn’t work, and saying “I’m sorry” when you did something wrong. We look up [...]

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Paying Your Employees To Quit

Ross | May 27th, 2008

Zappos, the online shoe store, has a very unusual approach to weeding out customer service employees that Zappos does not believe will ultimately make the grade. One week into the training program for new customer service employees, Zappos offers new employees $1,000 to resign on the spot (about 10 percent accept). This is a very [...]

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