it’s such a WOW experience of visiting Zappos. Only inside it you see how its enterprise culture built on its service centric values and how this culture in turn influences the values of people working and visiting here.
This time I’m saying hello from the headquarter of Zappos at the Corporate Circle of Henderson, near Las Vegas. This place is a office blocks district with a lot of light colored buildings belong to big companies.
Like what we saw at the headquarter of Facebook, they also have a white board. You can find a tag cloud with all words related with Zappos. If someone see Graham, which is a big enough tag, it is related to Robert Graham, a clothes brand in United States, not our beloved Paul Graham.
At the reception hall you can already see many interesting decoration and book shelves filled with book about eBusiness and management. I find several posters of words that shed some light on the values of Zappos. You can click on the following picture to have a better look.
This warm-hearted lady, Renée is the tour guide of our visit at Zappos. She begins her introduction from the key word of this visit “SERVICE”. You can see all kinds of onsite services provided by the heldesk team of Zappos (Kan-du team), including car wash, laundry, dry clean, clothes tailor etc. Some of them are free, the others are with pleasant discount.
In the gallery to the office area, the both walls are covered with frames. They make gold and platinum records for employees with outstanding performances every year. They are all hung on the wall with skeches of employees and the annual culture books.
Now we are at the office area. Here is the merchandising department, those who work here are almost all buyers. You can tell who is in charge of which brand from the plate over their head. Zappos strongly encourages their employees to decorate their working environment with their own styles.
The desk of Tony Hsieh, CEO of this company, is among these cubicles. Renée laughed at the current status of his desk the so-called "organized chaos”.
I believe it’s really his office. But I think he doesn’t always work here, at least not at our visit. Let’s look closely what books he is reading recently:
At this moment, an old man working beside this cubicle came to say hi. He took out of a big box and told us it’s the fun box of Tony and we could choose any object we want from it as a gift. They were things like books, water bottles, ordinary things but still fun.
We then passed the merchandising teams of casual life and outdoors. The members of the outdoor team are all enthusiasts of at least one type of outdoor sports. Zappos believes that a specialist of a certain category of products must be at first place an expert-user who knows well the needs of a customer and is willing to use his or her knowledge to improve the customers’ experience. This is totally based on their service centric values.
The most interesting thing of this visit also happened here. Each team of the merchandising department have a certain instrument as the theme of the team, such as a little drum, a triangle or a bell. When we looked at them, they took a little break and played the instrument with a big smile to welcome us. I was so touched by the warm atomsphere and couldn’t help to think there must be so much fun to work here.
Here comes the working place of the content team. The description of every product and text content for marketing activity are all generated here. Cubicles are replaced by frames without glass. Many people go directly through these holes… The team for clothes.com is their neighbor, which is an independent vertical website for clothes online shopping, a market 4 times bigger than the market of shoes.
They have a small canteen at the end of the path on the first floor. At the entrance, we saw a poster showing the welfare of a Zappos employee, including things like vocation, health care etc. Like at Facebook and Google, any food and drink are free.
Getting up through the “stairway to culture” covered by graffiti, we arrived at the second floor, the department of customer service, a team of about 500 employees. It’s almost the time for lunch. So it’s half empty in this place.
Have you noticed the blue plate over every cubicle? Actually the green numer in right-up corner tells the length of time that the employee worked for Zappos. Renée explained that it’s for facilitating the communication and cooperation between employees. Beginers can easily find a experienced employee and get helped.
Most part of the famous Zappos 24/7 customer service is completed here. Amazingly the representatives encourage the customers to talk whatever they want in the phone to make them feel completely comfortable during the customer service. Renée told us, the longest customer phone call took about 8.5 hours… It was a cyclist who called to ask some information about a pair of bicycle shoes and got so excited to talk about his cycling experience…
Every customer who has experienced the customer service has chance to receive a feedback card. Some customers filled the card with words and pictures to say thanks.
There are several room like this in the headquarter. They call it the Royalty Room. It’s a place to do special things where there is no computer. Employee can talk, think, plan or do whatever they feel special in this room. And when you sit on this throne, you feel yourself more important.
There is a special team in the customer service department: resource desk team. The team members are all experts of solving problems. Each time there is some problem that a normal representative cannot deal with, it will be transfered to this team. Sometimes when they are facing some questions about the detail of wearing experience, they will get connected with the sample team at Kentucky and let the colleague over there wear the shoes personally for delivering an accurate feedback.
This is the place for a small team called F.A.C.E, meaning folks answering CEO’s emails. They are in charge of replying to mails and emails to Tony Hsieh. And because he receives so much mails everyday, they are often very busy.
The following picture shows the team taking care of order information and transaction security. Do you guys see the lovely “firewall” over their cubicles? Every order will be checked here in order to prevent transaction fraud.
About to finish the tour in this two-story building, we were led down through another stairway for presenting the art works of Zappos employees – the Zouvre (Louvre of Zappos) and back to the first floor. We found a little poster showing the key numbers of the day. It’s the only place where we cannot take pictures. But I noted down these numbers:
Inventory for 4/12/2011
Yesterday Sales: $5,965,428.61
Today Zappos.com has
5,992,076 UNITS IN STOCK
219,76 STYLES ON THE SITE
We asked Renée a question when seeing those numbers: what’s the return rate of Zappos. She said it’s about 14%. It may seem too high for an e-Tailer but Zappos encourages customers to order several pairs of shoes to compare and help them to make decisions. The shipping and return are totally free. By doing this, Zappos wants to make up the shortage of the online shopping experience compared with offline, but a lot of customers ended up with buying all pairs of shoes they received in hands.
At the end of this tour, Renée asked each one of us to wear a crown and sit into a throne that looked like the one we saw in the Royalty Room. “Here we see customers like kings and queens”, as telling us this, Renée took a picture for everyone.
We also received two books as a souvenir of the visit: one is the famous Zappos book Delevering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, the other is the 2010 Culture Book of their employees.
Yes, it’s such a WOW experience of visiting “a service company that just happens to sell shoes”. Only inside it you see how its enterprise culture is built on its service centric values and how this culture in turn influences values of people working and visiting here.
Not like other cold e-Tailors, Zappos reminds me of the baker’s store at the corner of the street where I live. The old baker knows you well and says “how are you doing” from the heart. He cares about your appetite and remembers your taste. He will suggest you to buy this kind of bread that’s cheaper because it’s popular among children and he hopes your kid will like it too. Only in this way you have a emotional connection with him and believe that what he brings to you is a lifelong value.
After being lost in the myth of SEO and adWords for almost 10 years, companies like Zappos lead us back to those values that merchants used to treasure so much.
The Chinese version of this article is published on 36kr.com.
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