The “Operation Red Shoes” story didn’t happen by accident.
It didn’t happen by chance, either.
It happened by design.
The possibility for great things to happen is simply built into the corporate structure here at Zappos—a direct reflection of our core values. And it’s the kind of thing you can make happen at your company or small business, and in your life, too.
As Head of External Culture Training, I am lucky to lead an amazing team of Zapponians tasked with sharing the lessons (that is, “insights”) we’ve learned here at Zappos with other business leaders across the country and around the world. So I couldn’t be happier to see Operation Red Shoes kick off this employee-driven book, because it’s such a great example of what can happen when everything we hope to accomplish at this company comes together.
Zappos Insights is the official name of the team that provides various training and coaching programs, including culture training (“Culture Camp”), customer service training (“School of WOW”), and external speaking (“Zappos Represents!”).
Many people think that Zappos is a website that sells shoes. But that’s just what we are on the surface. What we really are, what we’ve always been, is a service company that just happens to sell shoes (and other products). We are truly a company built on putting service first. For us, it’s all about establishing and nurturing personal human connections.
Internally, we have an acronym called PEC to describe what we are trying to accomplish with each and every customer interaction: Personal Emotional Connection.
The depth of personal connection that Teri made on the phone with Susan and McKendree is something every one of us here at Zappos strives to make with every customer we encounter every day.
There’s a lot of buzz in the business world today about creating a “customer-obsessed culture.” The idea is that customers are everything to your business, and they need to be treated like the dollar-wielding, camera-phone-touting, social-media-driving powerhouses they are if any modern-day business wants to survive, let alone make a profit.
But at Zappos we don’t look at it quite that way. Not that we don’t have what some might call a customer-obsessed culture here. We do. We think about our customers all the time. But what do we mean when we talk about “customers”? And how do we interpret the concept of being “obsessed” with them?
There’s no one formula to follow. At Zappos, customer service isn’t about following a checklist or a script. It isn’t about obsessively responding to customer Tweets in real time, or trying to act fast to quell customer complaints—although both of those things are important if done authentically and for the right reasons. It doesn’t mean that we give things away for free all the time, or that we’re putting on some sort of an act to try to get customers to like us, either. In fact, just the opposite is true.
Many people think that Zappos is a website that sells shoes. But that’s just what we are on the surface. What we really are, what we’ve always been, is a service company that just happens to sell shoes.
The heart of Zappos’ culture is that we view our customers as much more than a source of transactions. We strive to understand our customers’ needs and to recognize that, in some cases, an order of shoes or some other product can mean much more. The real magic of our business culture is that we see our customers as humans. We see them as family. We see them as our neighbors and our friends. We see them as fellow employees. We see them . . . as us. And we know that the best thing we can do for each other is to treat each other authentically, the way humans should be treated under the best of circumstances. Which means that we do our best to lead with our hearts and to try to do the right thing for all of our customers, all of the time.
We want our customers to be happy. Truly happy. And we want to keep spreading that happiness around.
That’s why our employees wanted to put this book together: We’ve been working on our service-first mentality for nearly twenty years. I’ve been here for most of those years, and I can tell you we didn’t come to this conclusion overnight. It took time for us to understand that this mindset works best when it’s genuine. What we do at work and what we do at home isn’t and shouldn’t be two different things, because putting service first matters as much in business as it does in life. It took us years to fully grasp just how possible it is for a business to act more human, to have a little more heart, and to learn that doing the right things instead of just the profitable things actually creates more “profit” for everyone. And we are still learning every day.
At Zappos, our core values are an honest part of everything we do. They are guardrails that guide our way.
We’ve heard that we have done something pretty unique at Zappos: We’ve been able to retain our brand and our culture even after a major acquisition. A decade after being acquired by one of the biggest companies in the world—Amazon—we’re still prioritizing our customers and our culture more than ever.
So how does a company grow from scratch into a business that’s worthy of a $1.2 billion acquisition, and then survive and keep its core solid, all while continuing to grow in a rapidly changing environment? How can a company develop that type of resilience?
We believe that it all comes down to two pillars.
The first is a set of core values from which everything starts and ends. These aren’t the type of “corporate values” or “mission statements” that get discussed in meetings and put on some document and forgotten. At Zappos, our core values are an honest part of everything we do. They are the guardrails that guide our way. Kind of like the Constitution, they serve as the basis of every decision we make and every venture we tackle. Our core values allow us to always know where we stand, so we can rest assured that we’re always moving forward with our compass pointed in the right direction.
Our core values were discussed at length in Tony’s first book, Delivering Happiness. But for those who’ve never seen them (and as a reminder for those who have), our core values at Zappos are:
1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and a Little Weirdness
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’ll see each of these core values in action over the course of this book. You can also take a deep dive into our Oath of Employment (see page 235). It’s a document we give to all new hires, and beyond listing Zappos’ Ten Core Values, it defines exactly what