Question: How do you build an outstanding company?

Answer: Start with a commitment to establish a culture of delivering outstanding service to your customers. “OK, fine”, you say. What the heck does that mean and how do you actually do that? The two most important prerequisites are:

1. The top leadership (President/CEO) must be convinced that spending time and money to develop a customer service culture will yield a significant return on investment.
2. Develop on-boarding processes that facilitate hiring only those people that are predisposed to providing great customer service.

This morning on the CNBC program Squawk on the Street, I listened to the founder and CEO of Zappos.com, Tony Hsieh, as he outlined his strategy for creating a culture of great customer service in his 1,600 person on-line shoe company. Zappos puts all new employees coming into their Las Vegas headquarters (even if you are an attorney or an accountant) through 4 weeks of customer service training. About a week into the training program, an offer is made to each new employee: quit now and we will pay you a $1500 “quitting bonus” in addition to being paid for the time you have worked. Approximately 2%-3% of the employees going through the training program accept this offer. Let’s face it, to stay (and give up that instant $1500) you have to have some faith in the future of the company.

Here are a couple more hints about how serious they are about customer service. Their logo contains the phrase “Powered by Service” and their call center is called the “Customer Loyalty Team”. Time for some new shoes!

Note: Thank you to Chris Jones for initially putting this company and its culture on my radar.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Great Service, Service Tools, Service in the News, Service Tips, Service Best Practices, Accountability in Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.