Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
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When I moved to Australia, I thought it would be a lot better. It wasn't much different.
When I joined a wine subscription startup in 2016 as the technical co-founder, I wasn't just building the recommendation engine. I was also helping to pack the boxes at the warehouse.
We all got fascinated with Tony's book "Delivering Happiness" [1]. As I packed boxes, I listened to the audiobook several times. Then I read it later on again.
I'm still surprised how bad customer service is in most companies. Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now.
A few years later and our customers are obsessed not just about the wine we recommend. They also write love letters about how happy they are to deal with our customer service team. I'm still writing code on the other side, but it makes my day to see that part of the business working so well.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6828896-delivering-happi...
I maintained a 100% flawless NPS/satisfaction survey rating the entire time, but my mean call time was also nearly triple that of everyone else.
I helped far fewer people, but the ones that I did help I frequently ended up actually educating, resulting in nearly no repeat calls.
Management could never come up with a purely zendesk based overall performance metric I wasn't near the bottom of. I never much cared because at least weekly a customer that I helped would try to convince me to quit and come work for them as a private consultant, making it incredibly hard for my manager to convince me I should change anything at all about what I was doing.
I left after 3 years and shortly after the whole thing got outsourced to an Alorica call center. So I guess management did figure it out, they'd rather have 4 people who's only qualification is the ability to fog a mirror, giving out near worthless support very quickly, than pay for 1 person like me.
As a consequence, I eventually gave in and decided to improve my numbers to see how "well" i could do. I was able to cut down my times to about a third of a normal agent, but that also resulted in me being more robotic and much less of a human to the customers.
This is what caused service reps to waste everyone's time with elaborate fake displays of empathy and forced unwanted small talk. I'd prefer an efficient robot.
I worked on a SaaS product that was essentially a booking engine. Vacations, rentals, tours, b&bs; etc. Their product was complete shit and it was so stressful to work on. Nearly a decade of terrible choices and the wrong technologies stacked up like a card house.
The only thing that kept the customers there was the insanely talented and competent customer service. They knew the app inside and out and were able to smooth out the insane number of rough edges for new and old customers alike. When gifts were sent to the company, they were typically sent to customer service.
Everyone in CS was paid terribly. It really bothered me. The software team was doing a Bad Job and getting paid well for it, and CS was really saving everyone’s asses. Since then I look at the customer support team a lot differently.
This is an easy thing to say as a customer or a customer success oriented person.
I am leaving a support role just now. I am actually taking a pay cut to do so. Almost all of my customers speak to me in a rude tone.
I have no incentive to pretend to have an interest in their issues. I don’t think the issue is with customer support, but general attitudes among IT professionals.
On top of this, customer success is treated as a second class to engineering even if our problems are harder and more stressful. Imagine finding a bug and being blamed for the bug not being fixed while at the same time engineering is mad at you for wanting it fixed. Gross.
Anyway- support; never again.
I suspect that you're going to catch some grief for this statement. :)
Reader, working in customer care blows. It sucks hardcore. From my engineering work, I actually knew what the cause of the problems were and understood the timeline for fixing them -- information that real customer care reps rarely have available to them, but even that wasn't enough to appease some people. Even when people weren't rude, just the never-ending barrage of complaints and problems that I had to fix wore me down. And I only worked one shift, and then went back to engineering the next day.
People who can do this day after day, retain their composure, and somehow not burn out from the nature of the work are awesome, and they have my respect. Their jobs are absolutely more difficult than mine.
As an internal engineer, when an internal ticket comes in I'm going to track down the issue, may realize it's a known thing that requires a lot of planning to resolve, loop in my manager, etc. but ultimately it usually ends with "we don't have time to address this right now and it doesn't affect enough users". If you're lucky there's a workaround that can be shared.
Now, I don't like that. I'd rather fix the issue for the user but I already have committed deadlines and team goals and it's rather easy to just go with a "sorry, we may revisit in Q1 or Q2 next year".
The support agent still has to a) deal with the customer's anger and b) cannot be honest with them, i.e. needs to wrap the situation in a blanket of corporate speak so as not to shed a bad light on internal teams / the company. At the end of the day they are just powerless and have to take on the responsibility in front of the user, whereas the engineer may feel unsatisfied not being allowed to spend time on it, but ultimately is far enough removed from the user to be actually affected by the situation. Granted, personally I always try my best to get a fix out but a lot of engineers would rather work on their projects and the managers want that too.
FWIW, when I did customer support I always reminded myself that nothing is personal. When I'm at the opposite end (a customer) I also don't get mad at the individual I'm dealing with unless they are not trying to understand or help at all.
Funny thing is I used to take things personally and it did occasionally lead to me going the extra mile to save the situation, but it is just so emotionally exhausting, to the point where I do not think it is humanly possible to maintain that level of service (I suppose some one might be able to, but I have not met anyone like that).
A part of me misses that do-or-die personal commitment to the customer, but for the most part I enjoy not going insane
This customer had become aware of the MTTR metric driven bouncing around with his tickets and was playing cat-mouse.
I got this lost-cause chore as a good-bye (sarcasm) gift and it took me 1h to study the problem (at that stage, a PIP offense) identify the issue and report the bug, respond to the customer with a well-written apology, confirming that they were correct and a bug tracker id to follow.
Customer was very pleased they were finally escalated to the adult in the room ;)
The worse cases are when the Customer Rep gets a problem from a customer they have little power to resolve. When you are:
- logging tickets to a black hole of "higher tier" support with no communication back to you.
- "chasing them up for the customer" aka by putting notes in a ticket
...you feel powerless.
Then when the next call comes in from the customer you begin to think "Why am I even here. I can't do anything..."
Customer Support need to see their efforts make a difference, just like most people, in order to be motivated to do it again.
I suppose if I was an entrepreneurial type, I'd try to disrupt industries like that by creating a company that charges extra to provide service that doesn't make customers want to spit in your face. Surely there's a market for that...
I wonder if companies are relying on your empathy. They want you to realize this and just close tickets before they're resolved. Like the service desk's primary directive is to get customers off their employer's backs. If they happen to fix an issue along the way, that's a nice bonus.
For example, I've had to call Amazon 4 times recently over the same issue. I've been lied to each time that they fixed it. I was promised evidence that I was never given. I really don't know what to do about this...
In more polite terms, "Try to escalate the ticket by 15 minutes if you haven't resolved the issue."
I still don't understand why companies treat support as a second class function to engineering. Engineering should in fact clamor to support to better understand customer issues and get them fixed and out of the way. I also find that support teams operate mostly on linear growth, meaning it is still a human scale problem. I don't see technology in the IVR/ticketing space innovating at the same rate as other areas.
IMO, the best alleviation for support is to avoid that customer call in the first place. Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call. It's a super hard problem to solve.
Needs something like StackOverflow for every problem domain, delivered over voice.
How companies should do this: provide self-serve options for most things. Make the status of a long-running transaction transparent. Fix issues that cause people to call in the first place.
How companies actually do this:
IVR>You can find self service options on our
Customer> 0
IVR> .. site to check your ...
Customer> 0
IVR> ... transfer funds and ...
Customer> 000000...
On the one extreme you can offer voice based support - Just blurt out your question to the phone, system does speech -> text and answers your question. Super super hard.
Interim at least you can offer support on Whatsapp/Facebook where someone can actually ask a question and get answered - a much better version of the chat bots that exist today.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030816-00/?p=42...
Even Bill Gates did this:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=15...
The fundamental problem is coders want to code. At least in my experience. Many are poor to terrible at talking to customers and have little desire to learn. If it isn't related to code they don't care. It's someone else's problem.
A few developers, the good ones I've worked with, know how to talk to customers and how to talk to support team members to help them.
I work in a support role now and I have worked in a development role in the past. I know both sides of it fairly well.
Finding good developers isn't trivial, but finding good developers that can communicate and work as a team, that's really hard.
I have seen the flip side also where the developers are very accessible, support pushes every minor issue over to engineering. This is like super rare though.
- limited decision power. Many times even though you genuinely want to help customor you can't because of it.
- have to cover up others' lies like sales people etc
But still, I would recommend having support experience (atleast a month)to developers. It will change your attitude to solve problem. What really matters to customer is not fancy tech-stack or shiny interface but working service.
The Edmunds onboarding experience has been by far the best out of any company I worked at. Sure, it was silly games and scavenger hunts that didn't really have anything to do with "work," but I look back at the entire experience with a lot of nostalgia. I loved the onboarding so much, I've been contemplating doing a startup that literally just focuses on improving cultural onborading at companies. It made my first few months at Edmunds not only incredibly productive, but also intellectually and socially stimulating.
And they were doing something right. Over there, I had the honor of working with one of the best managers I ever had (he's now at Amazon), and with one of the best software architects I've ever worked with (he's now at Facebook). My team was made up of motivated, smart, folks from all walks of life (recent grads to data science PhD's in their 50s). I still keep in touch with my old team even though we're spread all over these days: doing our own startups, at Facebook, Uber, Amazon, and beyond.
I have the utmost respect for the cultural revolution that entrepreneurs like Tony Hsieh brought to the fore. People that call it a "cult" are missing the point. It's no more a cult than cheering for your school mascot or being in a club. We seem to forget that people are inherently social and need a sense of belonging.
As someone who used to work at a company that also was fairly well known for its 'cultish' culture, while I agree with your statement above, I also strongly believe that the modern corporate workplace is fundamentally incompatible with the sense of social belonging that humans need. Worse, many smart people take advantage of this need for a sense of belonging with the sole goal of making more money for rich people.
Early human social groups, namely the family, village, and tribe, were strongly cohesive. You were only "kicked out" if you had made some severe transgression against the group (or you had "come of age", and needed to start your own group, which is something else entirely). You were not kicked out the second the group's profits took a dip or it was determined you were dead weight and the group you could do better without you. But these days "fiduciary duty" actually demands the group leaders take a simple utilitarian viewpoint of whether they keep you in the group.
This isn't meant to be totally pessimistic. Some of my favorite times and best friends were at companies that had a great corporate culture with a corporate mission I believed in. But these actually tended to be more mature organizations that were honest about what they were doing: being a successful business that made money, was an enjoyable place to work, and created value for customers. It's actually the 'cultish' places I find that people get extremely bitter when they leave because they were sold a bill of goods that was never true to begin with.
Totally agree with this and you should always draw a line between "work stuff" and "personal stuff." There's definitely a dark side here. However, I do think there's value in making your employees feel welcome and wanted.
More like there's more value in making your employees feel welcome and wanted by feeding them Kool-Aid, rather than paying them well.
Any employee who isn't a total fool should know this and the executives certainly do because they have to to keep their efficiency numbers and bottom line looking decent. So any claims to the contrary just sound forced, false and absurd because that's all the are, the employee equivalent of some corp also expressing loving platitudes to its customers
Example: during the pandemic I've seen several major banks and other corporations send out emails and publicity material with phrases like "we're all in this together" scattered around it..... Yeah. as if my own experience as some random individual customer or employee with limited resources and all sorts of personal struggles in any way relates to their main concerns as a multibillion dollar corporation.
So yes, comparing almost any company except a literal extended family business or a small startup staffed by a group of close associates and friends working together to a tribe or family group is empty nonsense 99% of the time.
It seemed pretty clear to me that Zappos was in decline as an independent entity. Fulfillment was already gone. They were in the middle of removing their product photography team. A section of their office was being used as a community co-working space. There were fun quirky office areas but completely devoid of employees. It wasn't clear if Zappos did anything beyond customer service. I don't know if Tony Hsieh could really call himself a CEO anymore under Amazon's thumb.
Zappos was really proud of their long weird onboarding process. They stress over and over their core values. You write and perform a skit about those core values to the company when you "graduate". At the end, if you don't think Zappos is the place for you, they'll pay you a few thousand dollars to leave. I'd imagine that people who aren't completely in love with the company would never go through this process.
Personally I find the “we’re a family” attitude of a lot of these places deeply offputting; most families won’t lay off members when things get tough economically, so let’s stop pretending that we’re doing this for fun.
But ultimately, isn't that what Zappos is? Their bread & butter? Footware is a commodity. Ecomm stores more or less a commodity. Fulfillment? The same.
The key point to being unique? Service. A lesson more ebusinesses wpuld be wise to learn.
That’s basically the business model of REI; they rarely have the best prices, but if something breaks they’ll make it right.
"Doubt is a dealbreaker."
Whether the question is returns or something else. Few will open their wallet if they have doubt. Unlimited and free returns removed a large amount of doubt. If fact, as mentioned, it likely triggered more sales.
You'd have to spend a significant amount of marketing budget to get what Zappos did from their return policy and customer service. Those weren't expenses, they were investments.
This actually applies to all relationships.
They were gross. The happiness culture is toxic and if you don't buy into it and aren't projecting rays of sunshine 24/7 from all your orifices you're expected to just fuck off.
When I was younger I may have written a very similar comment about some places I've worked... and while I still agree that the environment wasn't my cup of tea... my intolerance of others was a bigger problem.
Thank you for calling the abrasive tone out.
My mom is an avid walker and she loves comfortable shoes so most birthdays and Christmas’s I send her a pair from Zappos.
The hand written note is such a nice touch for such a big business (especially from a parent company like Amazon- the anti-personalizer) that it makes the gift of Zappos (or even the gift card) something fun to give and fun to receive.
Tony, keep on experimenting! It makes it more fun for the customer.
I'm very curious why you get them when I don't...? :P
If my employer opened an office anywhere near Las Vegas, I'd list my house and call the moving truck the next day.
Weed is now legal there, so it smells like that outside everywhere.
If I ever achieve my dream of being a seasonal nomad, Vegas just might make the cut.
* Limited non-competes
* Limited IP assignment clauses
* Limited anti-moonlighting clauses
It's hard to start a business when your current employer can block you from doing so.
Where I come from, the business culture can be described as somewhere between complacent and cautious that borders on cowardice. There's really no other choice but to bootstrap or relocate to California.
I think the revitalization project was at least somewhat successful.
[0] great techno music in the genre's birthplace
[1] Founder of Quicken Loans - recent article with some extra context https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2020/07/09/dan-gi...
It was ... odd.
My immediate impression was favorable. A very quirky looking area -- a small outdoor mall, with the buildings framing a little courtyard area. Built out of shipping containers, or something that looked like that.
But the businesses. Each one was quirky in the extreme. A combination convenience/art supply store. A store selling nothing but socks. A store selling used luxury goods. Maybe one of these could survive in a high traffic area of a conventional mall, but there was nothing to draw anyone. There was a bar that had some odd twist, but I don't remember what the twist was.
I didn't see how the area could survive. It wasn't right in the middle of downtown LV, so I don't think they could rely on people visiting there. I'm sure there were people like me who somehow heard of it, and went to visit. But one visit was plenty. There was absolutely nothing to draw me back. And it was pretty deserted.
I have lived in Las Vegas for 24 years. We moved here to raise a family because it is my wife's home town. (Her father was a scientist and manager with the federal government.)
I was and am in tech, working from home except for two years with one of the very few successful tech startups in Las Vegas from 2000-2001.
I wanted the tech-oriented revitalization to succeed, but it it hasn't and we are moving to Utah ("Silicon Slopes").
Money, money Everywhere, but not a dime to spend.
Anyway, I've just left Utah forever, and live in Arkansas now.
As someone who grew up, went to school, and worked in tech in Vegas, I place some of the blame on UNLV and its computer science program.
The computer science curriculum taught at UNLV is designed to do nothing more than churn on casino gaming employees; it's so extreme that the only web development course doesn't even count towards your computer science degree. It's absolutely bonkers to me how students are trained from the start to feed right into the golden handcuffs of the casino industry and yet people wonder why Vegas can't get it's tech industry started.
There's just simply no local talent pool here as a result. The casino industry is, in my opinion, a solved domain with little innovation room for incoming passionate engineers. I remember applying to a big gaming company here for an internship while at UNLV, and they legitimately couldn't provide a clear answer to "How often do you innovate within your domain, and what are some examples".
I feel fortunate that I had already found an interest in topics outside the gaming industry and managed to land a job here for a tech company constantly moving the needle in a challenging domain.
https://longnow.org/seminars/02014/apr/22/helping-revitalize...
I assumed they were a fresh startup around 2015 or so when they started getting a lot of media traction.
Maybe I was just out of the loop, but that's really surprising to me.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=z...
Even if the company practises seem to have had a knock-on effect. .. if the article is accurate of course.
Stock went up 30 times since then. I wonder many shares he kept.
seems like a good dude. Hopefully he kept most of it
No idea what people think of Zappos, their culture, and Tony in 2020. I was able to interact with him I guess via email and in person from ~2008-2010?
Every interaction I had with Tony, and every story I heard, he was just Tony. Personally happy for him, as 21 years at the head of any clothing/fashion/design company has to be tough.
http://whatupwilly.blogspot.com/2006/01/in-n-out-100x100.htm...
Hsieh has also made some strange choices internally like to reorganize using “circles” (holocracy). I’ve heard secondhand that this experimental approach to management didn’t work out in practice, that a lot of talent left, and that the circles ended up having organically emergent managers anyways.
When I lived in Nevada, he was heralded as the future savior of downtown Las Vegas, having bought up a bunch of dead motels and vacant lots to transform into something new and better. Plenty of "tech disruptor" headlines in the newspapers.
After a few years, when virtually nothing came of it other than a quirky-but-empty strip mall and a clubhouse for his hangers-on to gather in, there started appearing articles about people being unhappy with how things were going, and him in particular.
Never heard about any strife from inside Zappos, though.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/hsieh-lands-in-court-...
https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/nightclu...
https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/downtown-project-lays...
When you embrace it, you will definitely piss off a LOT of people
society is all about 'being polite' and 'wearing a mask'
if you stop being polite and stop wearing masks, while still maintaining common courtesy
life becomes MUCH easier
I'll give you an example
2 of your friends have problems which prevent them from having a good relationship
you have a frank talk with them
Hey, Jack, you need to get over your abandonment issues and commit to a woman and marry her. You've passed on some pretty amazing women just because your father walked away when you were 4
Hi Sophie, perhaps the reason you only date losers is that is your type. Perhaps your type is guys who will cheat on you. Perhaps when your mother divorced your father after he cheated on her with her sister, his secretary, and the school principal, you should have realized that's genetically your type. So you can either accept that you are making this choice and be at peace with it, or you CHANGE your decision making process
*
guess what's going to happen
usually, 1 of them will get mad at you, then realize you are right, and then make a change, and then your friendship will be much stronger
and the other will hate you for life. Well not hate you. Will avoid you forever
So that's what radical honesty and radical transparency does
*
of course you have to be prepared for people to also be radically honest with you
you find out things that are painful. Then you have to decide whether you will embrace the honest feedback you are getting or run away from it
Radical honesty works great with I-statements (e.g., "I stopped listening to you a couple minutes ago because you're boring me") in terms of communicating effectively without the baggage of courtesy. But radical honesty for criticism rarely works as well as propenents think.
Over the rest of the interview with various folks there was a distinct split of believers and "yeah this place is weird, but I can't leave just yet" groups. Pretty clearly it works though.
Edit: One example. It's minor, but indicative of the weirdness. As a "visitor/interviewee", I was obligated to carry around a 6 foot flagpole with a sizable Zappos flag on it for the several hours I was there. Not a deal breaker by itself, but odd enough I knew the place wasn't for me, because there was probably more of the same coming. Maybe it was some kind of test?
Seems like a good guy. The office experience is very unique.
He also has a comic book: https://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-...
Completely tanked DT Las Vegas project, but that was easy to call. Way out of his skillset.
A pretty good guy I think. Always followed through with promises to the best of his abilities, never did me wrong. Just a weirdo. Which ain't so bad.
built a good company
AMAZING service
Amazon tends to buy up all the companies that could become a threat to them, and then slowly kills them off (Zappos, Quidsi/Diapers.com, etc)
What Tony could have and should have done is
get someone like Marc Lore and have him expand Zappos to the EVERYTHING store
Zappos customer loyalty was insanely high
Before Tony gave the above speech, Tim introduced Hsieh and his relationship in investing in Zappos.
I may not have this quite right but I believe Tim talked about a time where either Hsieh needed bridge money and either Tim's fund or DFJ had to make a call on whether to bail out Zappos.
IIRC, Tim or the fund he was managing chose not to bail out Hsieh.
It may have been because of the 2000 crash, I can not remember. But Tim was very open about this decision and I believe the choice Tim made was not good for Tony at the time. I can’t say for sure, but I recall Tim saying it hurt their relationship.
He told this story standing right next to Hsieh.
I'm not sure exactly how but they worked it out, not only because Hsieh pulled through and raised capital elsewhere, but because he was there to give that talk in person. The relationship was clearly in good shape.
Wish I could remember more details. I'll try to get them if the opportunity presents itself.
I don’t have a lot to share, and out of respect for folks privacy. I won’t share much. I will say this. Their customer service isn’t a lie and it’s good inside and out. But much of their culture is PR. Internally it’s far more toxic than you see on the exterior. It is cult like.
I think Kedar is a solid person, and while him and I have our differences. I think he’ll make a great CEO and has the qualities needed. While his approach may be different than Tony’s approach. I don’t think it will be lesser, if that makes sense.