Delivering Happiness

Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company
1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not
just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come
from the top.
2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday
vocabulary.
3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they
want to provide great service… because they actually do.
Escalations to a supervisor should be rare.
4. Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or
abuse your employees.
5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and
don’t use scripts.
6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your
customers, but to your employees as well.
7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service
brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize.
8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of
WOW experiences to everyone in the company.
9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer
service.
10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and
vendors.
Culture
Today, we offer tours of our headquarters in Las Vegas to the general
public. Tours take about an hour, and we open ourselves up to the public
because we’ve found that it’s a great way for people to get a true sense of
our culture. It’s one thing to read about it, but almost everyone who has

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gone on our tour tells us that it isn’t until they actually visit our offices and
feel our culture that they finally understand why it is so important.
It wasn’t always this way. We certainly never planned to give public
tours. It’s just another example of something that evolved organically over
time for us, and our employees chose to embrace it and take it to the next
level.
Today, we work with more than a thousand different vendors. In the
beginning, whenever a new vendor visited our offices, someone from our
merchandising team would give them a tour of our operations. Over time,
as word of mouth spread, we found that friends of our vendors wanted to
get a tour, and eventually we started getting random requests from friends
and customers to go on a tour.
In the early days, a tour would take less than ten minutes, but as more
and more people started touring our offices, different groups within Zappos
started to come up with different ideas on how to make each tour more and
more of a WOW experience for our visitors.
Every tour is different, because you never know who is going to be in
the office or what a team decided to do over the weekend to surprise our
visitors. If you were to show up for a tour today, you might find a popcorn
machine or a coffee machine dressed up as a robot in our lobby. As you
passed through different departments, you might find an aisle of cowbells
(“more cowbell?”), a makeshift bowling alley built by our software
developers, employees dressed up as pirates, employees karaokeing, a nap
room, a petting zoo, or a hot dog social. You might see a parade pass by
because one of our departments decided that it was the perfect day to
celebrate Oktoberfest. And you might say hi to our life coach (our own
internal version of Tony Robbins), wear a crown, and get your picture taken
and put up next to the pictures of Serena Williams or Gladys Knight when
they came and toured our offices. Or you might happen to show up during
our annual “Bald & Blue” day, where employees volunteer to get their
heads shaved by other employees.