Walking in Their Shoes

In summer 2017, Andrew French and I visited Zappos headquarters to research the secret sauce of their customer-centric culture and build it into the training we were building.

Perhaps some of their inspiration would rub off on us if we walked in their shoes, so to speak.

The real reason we were there? Because one of their agents noticed I couldn’t settle on a pair of sandals earlier that year AND asked me what pair I’d want if price weren’t an issue AND offered me better sandals at a discount AND included a copy of Tony’s book, ‘Delivering Happiness’ AND wrote a handwritten message inviting me to Las Vegas.

Wow!

On the tour we learned Zapponians wanted customers to say, “WOW!” In fact we said “wow” ourselves many times and our tour guide acknowledged every one as if he was keeping his own private tally.

I liked this “find-a-way-to-wow” idea a lot because it was both empowering and easy. I brought it back and pitched it to the team among many other ideas inspired by the wonder of wow.

The Wayside of Wow

What eventually came out of this project was something that I am really proud of, but not what I wanted at first.

Our team built a framing and guidelines model for customer service. We outlined values, and said exactly what modeled the behavior and what didn’t. We gave examples of what to do and what not to do. We told everyone exactly what to say and when to say it. This was largely out of advice from our leadership who cautioned us against giving the level of freedom that Zappos had.

I hated it.

I thought I was creating the soul-crushing rulebook I was handed on day one of my first retail jobs.

I was persuaded by leadership that our people don’t just want crystal clear directions, they need them. They need to know exactly what it required of them because, unlike Zappos, our people were attracted to and hired to do a very specific repetitive task.

They were right, and here’s how I know.

Tony Hsieh, the 21-year CEO of Zappos who tragically and suddenly passed away, didn’t need to have that level of explicit and rote direction. His vision was simple and hopeful and inspiring enough to attract and retain and empower brilliant and purposeful people to do the right thing. (Coincidentally “do the right thing” was the failed catch phrase and predecessor to our hospitality cornerstones.)

A person like me would have thrived with that freedom. A person like me would have been hired specifically to use that freedom to power the creative service of the company.

To that end, it’s well-known that their new hires are offered a cash payment to quit following their training. The idea is that you’ll cost Zappos more as unengaged deadweight so if you’re not committed, please leave.

It’s probably less well-known that they’re encouraged to decorate their workspace. One employee (who had left for the day) had even built their own ball pit. The employee’s neighbor, photographed here did not comment, but I imagine he was trying to get as much done as possible in the absence of the unimaginable distractions that can only be produced by the type of office mate who puts their chair in a shallow pool of plastic balls….wow.

It wasn’t clear to me at the time, but I do recall it was this part of the tour where French and I started to say wow in a bad way.

As in, “wow I would want to kill myself if I worked here.” That moment brought into focus other odd practices like a new hire costume parade and a team of office designated fun-gineers who sounded like the type of people who either tried to make Sunday school cool writing raps about Moses or who chronically stumbled across comic sans font and thought it made the copy pop.

The fungineers to me represent the wayside of wow.

What works

This is why the corporate policies, the “Top 10 Things Your Company Must Do” Lists, the framework after framework after framework of generic solutions are at once both numerous and useless.

Numerous because everyone is looking for answers and inspired success stories that can help their organization grow.

Useless because they are only stories and summaries of what worked in those systems at that time.

You can’t cut and paste culture. And as a learning professional it’s now much more clear that the culture you want to create isn’t the same as the culture that will produce results.

So while I personally love the clarity around “find a way to wow,” that shouldn’t mean a new waiter at a restaurant should be given the freedom to find it too. In fact, that’s why we have jobs — to find it for them so they can trust us with what works and they can focus on theirs.