Tumbling Along With Me

10 Small Business Lessons From Zappos

Dec 22, 2009 -

Stories of Zappos, the online shoe retailer, and how they have pioneered a new way of doing customer service, using social media, and selling products online are now all over the business and trade media. From their policies such as paying new recruits to quit within their first 60 days (arguing it costs less in the long run) to having a manifesto of ten principles that guide their customer service team, Zappos has a model that many are trying right now to replicate.

Whether or not you think that the Zappos model may work for your business, there are definitely some lessons you can take away from their 10 guiding principles. Here they are along with some thoughts on how you might be able to apply them to your small business:

1. Deliver WOW Through Service. This is all about doing more than the expected. Solving a customer’s need is the baseline and of course you always want to try and do that through customer service. Delivering a “WOW” is open to interpretation, but certainly means doing more than the basics.

2. Embrace and Drive Change. In many businesses, people are afraid of change. Change means more work. Change means you might do something wrong and potentially lose your job. Embracing change, however, is about adapting to your circumstances and not being afraid. Innovation comes from embracing and driving change.

3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness. Nothing is as empowering for employees as encouraging them to have fun and do things in a different way. Fun and wierd are not two words you typically see in any sort of customer service group - yet for Zappos it is a strong part of why they have such a fiercely loyal workforce.

4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded. Encouraging creativity is something that can often be frowned upon because you are trying to enforce rules - but this flexibility is also a big part of making employees feel empowered to do their job and think outside of what their job tells them to do.  

5. Pursue Growth and Learning.  The most successful organizations are ones that allow their people to grow their knowledge in order to do their job better. Making education, training and knowledge building a priority in your business sends a message that you care about working smarter and are willing to support your employees who try to find ways to do that.

6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication. Honesty is the key word here, as it is easy to think it is better to keep specifics of your business to yourself and not share them with your employees. Being honest about the state of the business can help you to get more commitment from your employees to do what needs to be done to make it better.

7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit. Most people would agree that a team should be like a family, but in practice they don’t act that way. A family spirit means a level of trust and dedication that should be your goal at your business. Positivity is something that comes with that. 

8. Do More With Less. Too often, it is easier for employees to rely on resources being provided by “the company” in order to get their jobs done. Encourage them to think about how they can do more with less, and then reward them for it. Those dollars they end up saving the company can really add up. 

9. Be Passionate and Determined. There really is no substitute for passion when it comes to getting things done. Sometimes you can inspire that passion with employees, but the best way to get it is to hire people who are passionate themselves about what they do and about what you do. 

10. Be Humble. Humility is attractive for employees and for customers. It means that success doesn’t go to your head and that you can maintain a real perspective on what is truly important. This is also one of those qualities that comes from the top, so to inspire humility in your company means that you need to live up to that lesson yourself.

Tags: send to a friend 0

Great insight into how Zappos became ZAPPOS!

For those who are trying to figure out where to put your 2010 marketing budget, here is a look at what the rest of the world (or at least a cross section of them) are doing.

Online rules of engagement are changing. Old school business approaches and methods are getting left behind for dynamic new mediums that offer more interaction and less broadcasting. Businesses and industries are realizing it’s no longer possible to simply say what you do - you need to say what you can do… Click Below To Read More

It is no secret that I am a big fan of the content and message that Danny Brown puts out into the world. Here is a great (and easy to remember) approach to take to applying Social Media to your business.

Several years ago, Coke realized that Coke.com is not their home page - it is Google.com, digg.com and YouTube. Take the time to keep abreast of what is showing up for your brand in these new social sites and search engines.

The single biggest misconception people have about their site is that the homepage that the spent countless hours redesigning is not nearly a web consumers first impression. Google is your homepage, so get with the program…

Here’s a list of my top ten things to consider doing:

• Use gmail to give every person in the organization that can read English an email address.
• Use a free website creating tool or even Squidoo to build a page about your company. Nothing fancy, but list your locations, your people (with addresses) and make it clear you want to hear from people.
• Start an email newsletter using Mad Mimi or Mail Chimp. Give the responsibility for the newsletter’s creation and performance to one person and offer them a bonus if they exceed metrics in sign ups and in reducing churn.
• Start a book group for your top executives and every person who answers the phone, designs a product or interacts with customers. Read a great online media book a week and discuss. It’ll take you about a year to catch up.
• Offer a small bonus to anyone in the company who starts and runs a blog on any topic. Have them link to your company site, with an explanation that while they work there, they don’t speak for you.
• Have the president post her (real) email address in every invoice and other communication the company sends out, asking people to write to her with comments or questions.
• Start a newsletter for your vendors. Email them regular updates about what you’re doing, what’s selling and what problems are going on internally that they might be able to help you with.
• Do not approve any project that isn’t run on Basecamp.
• Get a white board and put it in the break room. On it, have someone update: how many people subscribe to the newsletter, how many people visit the website, how many inbound requests come in by phone, how long it takes customer service to answer an email and how often your brand names are showing up on Twitter every day.
• Don’t have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve.
• Refuse to cede the work to consultants. You don’t outsource your drill press or your bookkeeping or your product design. If you’re going to catch up, you must (all of you) get good at this, and you only accomplish that by doing it.

The problem is no longer budget. The problem is no longer access to tools.

The problem is the will to get good at it.

Great post from Seth Godin for those who have been ignoring the shift in marketing, there is also some excellent suggestions for those of us who’ve embraced them.