that company, and so it’s separate from Zappos. If you go to www.deliveringhappinessbook.com, you can see the list of all the people that are there—and thenwe also have [a site] that sends you to the bus,www.deliveringhappinessbus.com. It shows you themapof all the cities and different events that we’re planning and have done so far.
In the course of your business for Zappos and Delivering Happiness, do you attend many meetings and conferences? Most of the conferences I go to are usually speaking engagements. But, yeah, last year I probably went to on average one a week. Now, during the bus tour, it’s averaging one every one ortwodays.
WhatMakes Zappos Tick?
“If you get the culture right,” Tony Hsieh says, “then most of the other stuff, whether it’s delivering great cus- tomer service or building a long-term, enduring brand or busi- ness—that type of stuff will happen naturally on its own if you make culture the No. 1 priority for any organization.” Here are the 10 “Zappos Family Core Values” from which the com- pany’s culture, brand, and business strategy spring: 1. DeliverWOWThrough Service 2. Embrace and Drive Change 3. Create Fun and a LittleWeirdness 4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded 5. Pursue Growth and Learning 6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit 8. Do More With Less 9. Be Passionate and Determined 10. Be Humble
You’ve pretty much worked all your career in online ventures. Do you believe that face-to-face interaction is still important to business? Well, for us we have a term that we use—we internally refer to it as“PEC,” and that stands for “personal and emotional con- nections.”That’s actually something that I talk a little bit about in my presentation. And for us, we’re an online business, and our focus formost of our customers is actually through the tele- phone; it’s not through online. Through the telephone you can develop a much more personal connection than you can through e-mail or live chat, for example. We’re actually huge proponents of face-to-face interaction.
The No. 1 priority for Zappos is company culture. That’s all about face-to-face interaction, and we actually encourage employees, especially managers, to spend 10 to 20 percent of their time outside the office with their team or the people they work with, to get that face-to-face interaction.We survey them later and ask them how much more productive or efficient is their team, because there are higher levels of trust, and com- munication is better, people are willing to do favors for each other because they’re doing favors for friends, not just co-work- ers. The answers we get back range anywhere from 20 percent to 100 percent more productive. We also apply that same philosophy to vendors that we
work with.We work with over a thousand different brands, and those are all about face-to-face interaction, whether we’re going to dinner, or drinks, or whatever.We offer tours to the public at our offices here in Las Vegas. You can just go to the website http://tours.zappos.com, and we’ll pick you up in a Zappos shuttle, give you a tour, and then drop you at the hotel afterwards.
Has Zappos changed since the sale to Amazon? It really hasn’t.As a precondition for even considering doing the deal, we told them that we wanted to remain independent and continue to grow the Zappos brand and culture and our way of doing business. So from our point of view, it’s as if we swapped out our board of directors with a new one and now, instead of flying to San Francisco once a quarter for a board meeting, we fly to Seattle.
What about those conferences turns you on? It really varies by conference.Alot of it is just the people that are there, whether they’re from our industry or just people from com- pletely different industries. For me, what’s interesting is really connecting with people and learning about different perspectives. It’s always interesting, because there are conferences on topics that you’d never think existed. For example, I spoke at a car- pet-cleaning conference, where everyone there was a professional carpet-cleaner.You would never think, “Oh, there’s a conference for that.” But it made sense once you think about it. And then [at] some conferences, the content, the speakers
they have lined up are really interesting, and it’s really great to get those perspectives as well from the speakers themselves, not the attendees. And then there are some conferences where really it’s less about what happens during the daytime, but just whoyou run into in the lobby bardownstairs, where everybody hangs out at the end of the day.
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You seem to get restless once you think you’ve conquered something. With Zappos, what keeps you coming in to the office every day? Well, for me it’s definitely not shoes. I guess I’ve always been passionate about customer service, and the idea of building up the Zappos brand to be about the very best customer service and customer experience is exciting, because then you’re not limited to just selling shoes online. It actually doesn’t even have to be limited to online.We talk about how there could one day be a Zappos airline, that’s just about the very best customer service and customer experience. So yes, it is true that I get bored and restless usually—but the great thing is, going into a completely different business, like airlines, for example, it makes much more sense to do that within the Zappos brand.
Hunter R. Slaton is a senior editor of Convene. www.pcma.org