Delivering Happiness

5
Platform for Growth:
Brand, Culture, Pipeline
Viva Las Vegas
In San Francisco, we were having a hard time finding people who wanted to
work in our customer service department. Even when we could hire good
people, we discovered that most of them viewed customer service as a
temporary job, something to bring in some extra money while they were
going to school or separately pursuing their real career or calling.
Part of the problem was the high cost of living, and part of the problem
was the culture. Working in a call center just wasn’t something that people
in the Bay Area wanted to do.
Toward the end of 2003, we started looking around at different options
for expanding our call center. We initially considered outsourcing our call
center overseas to India or the Philippines, but we remembered our hard
lesson from working with eLogistics: Never outsource your core
competency. If we were trying to build our brand to be about the very best
customer service, we knew that we shouldn’t be outsourcing that
department.
Wherever we decided to open up our call center, we had to own and run
it ourselves. After some research, we narrowed the list of possible locations
down to Phoenix, Louisville, Portland, Des Moines, Sioux City, and Las
Vegas.

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Our original plan was simply to open up a satellite call center, but as we
thought more about it, we realized that if we did that, our actions wouldn’t
really be matching our words. To build the Zappos brand into being about
the very best customer service, we needed to make sure customer service
was the entire company, not just a department. We needed to move our
entire headquarters from San Francisco to wherever we wanted to build out
our call center, which we had recently named our Customer Loyalty Team
(or just CLT).
A few of us discussed this at lunch one day and thought about the
different options we had. In the end, we decided that Las Vegas would be
the best move for the company. It wasn’t the cheapest option for us, but we
thought it would make our existing employees the happiest.
Two days later, we held a company meeting and announced that we were
relocating our headquarters to Las Vegas. We said that we would move our
Customer Loyalty Team there first, with the goal of having everyone else in
Vegas within six months.
When the announcement was made, everyone in the conference room
was in a state of shock. We told everyone to take a week before making a
decision one way or another. We had about ninety employees in San
Francisco at the time, and I had thought maybe half of them would decide
to uproot their lives and move with the company.
A week later, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that seventy employees
were willing to give Vegas a shot and see what would happen. In their
minds, it was all about being adventurous and open-minded. By that time,
many of the Venture Frogs Incubator employees had become full-time
Zappos employees and decided to move with Zappos as well.