The Conversation Manager

Last Monday I had the pleasure to visit the @zappos HQ in Las Vegas together with my friend, colleague Niels. I guess most of you heard the story about the biggest online shoe retailer in the world, who doesn’t really sell shoes but consumer happiness. A story I love, because it proves my point that you don’t need unique products to change the world, you need a unique and strong vision to do so. The Zappos CEO Toni believes that managing his company culture is key to his success and the foundation of the company growth. Zappos has been profitable since 2006 and was sold to Amazon.com for 1.2 billion dollars during 2009.

I have preached a lot about Zappos & Toni in the last few months, but I wanted to learn more. This week I am speaking in Las Vegas and combined it with a look behind the scenes.

Did you know that Zappos has 4 guided tours per day and each tour is fully booked? The tours are completely free and they pick you up with the Zappos mobile at your hotel: free of charge.

What strikes me is the extreme level in which the culture lives in the company. I’m not just talking about the crazy stuff you find on all people’s desks, but rather about the way Zappos facilitates employees to really act upon the culture. A small example: the customer loyalty team gets the objective to connect with people while calling with them. Once they feel they are connected, they get the advice to write a small handwritten post card to this client saying ‘I was happy I could help’ + some customization. How do they make sure people send these cards? Simple, by placing a bunch of cards & envelopes on everyone’s desk.

The culture lives at Zappos, that’s the least you can see. Just take a look at these pictures. I love these examples:

• The stairway to culture: in one of the stairways, employees can write on the walls what they feel as the Zappos culture. The wall is full with all kind of weird and fun messages. All of them explaining in their own words what the Zappos culture means to them.



• And their offices: they are just crazy. They are probably also the messiest offices I have ever seen, but there is fun everywhere. When you are walking around, each department has its own instrument (or at least something that makes a lot of noise). As soon as the tour walks by, they start to make noise and talk to you. It is amazing how Niels and I were walking around with a big smile on our faces. This is REAL fun.



• The ‘wow’ wall: on this wall people stick post it’s with messages about a ‘wow’ experience one of their colleagues gave them. If you’re positively surprised by someone, just let it know to the world and share it on the wow wall.

However, Zappos is not just about fun, it’s also about business and making things happen. They have big white boards in different rooms that follow up on objectives. One of their key objectives are happy clients, the daily measurement of the NPS score is part of the white board. O…the guy on the picture, that’s our guide: Jonathan Wolske and he is full of passion, great guy. Thanks again Jonathan!

It’s also about growth and sales @zappos. They have different ways of bringing sales into the company as something everyone should be proud of. First of all, they have a real time screen on which you can see where people are buying shoes. Every 4 seconds you get a sales update. Further, they are celebrating it when they break a new ‘day sales record’. The last record is from 2009, when they sold more than 7 million dollars on one day. It’s just a matter of weeks before they hit the 8 million. When it happens: the entire company gets a t-shirt saying ‘my company sold for 7 million dollar shoes on one day and all I got was this lousy t-shirt’. Focus on client happiness and sales are the combination of Zappos’ success.

My moment of glory: I could sit in the chair of my personal hero Toni. I don’t know who the other people were helping me out to make it a nice picture, but I guess it were the 2 other owners of the company. Have fun and be a little weird, it sure is  Thanks Zappos for inspiring me and many others. 

I came across an interesting article on identifying your brand ambassadors written by the Digital Royalty herself, Amy Martin. Amy has over 1.3 million followers on Twitter, so follow her if you are not doing so yet.

In the article Amy talks about the way they supported the launch of Tony his book Delivering Happiness. They used a blogger program that identified bloggers (not only business bloggers) and gave them an advanced copy of the book. 800 bloggers from around the world were involved. They were screened online (Facebook, Twitter, …) to see if they expressed the desire to spread the movement. According to Amy ‘identifying and empowering passionate customers/fans to promote your product or service can arguably be the most effective from of marketing!’ We cannot agree more!

After the launch these brand ambassadors were involved in the planning of the Delivering Happiness Bus Tour and will be consulted in the development of an online community.

Part two of my review of Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh.

The final chapter is about Delivering Happiness. It starts with a nice exercise: Ask yourself ‘What is your goal in life?’ … and then ask youself ‘Why?’ and then again ‘Why’ … Ultimately everyone ends up saying it would make me happier. We all have the same goal ‘Happiness’. Tony outlines different frameworks.

1. Happiness is about 4 things:

• Perceived control: being able to decide if you want to learn and grow yourself
• Perceived progress: feeling like you move forward
• Connectedness: focus on company culture
• Vision / meaning: being part of something bigger rather than financial performance

2. Maslow’s hierarchy

Once the basic needs of an employee are met, money is lower down the list compared to professional growth opportunities or the quality of the relationship with the manager.

3. Three types of happiness: pleasure, passion and higher purpose 

• Pleasure: always chasing the next thing 
• Passion: where peak performance meets peak engagement and time flies by
• Higher purpose: being part of something bigger

Some other ingredients for the success: 

• Stop chasing the money, start chasing the passion (when Tony decided to leave LinkExchange earlier than agreed with MS and leaving a lot of money behind!)
• Don’t outsource your core business
• Don’t focus on buzz as marketer but focus on building engagement & trust
• Deliver a WOW-experience through service 
• Don’t put traditional KPI’s on your call centre such as number of calls they can handle because that leads to getting off the phone with the client as fast as possible.
• Have Core Values you can commit on as a company
• A strong culture and committable core values are important because they create alignment among employees
• Build good relations with vendors, don’t position yourself as a client but as a partner. Work together with them!
• In terms of social media (strategy): be real and use your best judgment
• When presenting be real, be passionate and use personal stories

I especially liked the idea of the Face Game. At LinkExchange Tony realized he did not know everyone’s name anymore as the company was getting so big… At Zappos you get a picture of a colleague after you login and you have to tell his/her name. This increases the changes of serendipitous employee interactions.

Personally I love the mentality of doing a random act of kindness (or WOWness) and I find myself already doing it. And I have to share the core values, just listing them, while in the book (or on the links) they are explained in detail:

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

Overall conclusion? The book is fun and easy to read and I recommend it to everyone. It is not ground breaking or new, if you follow Tony and Zappos, but it gives you a good vibe, a good feeling and is teasing you to do things different in the future. If you haven’t seen or heard about Zappos before … it is a must read!