While I was attending an intensive, 10-day training program in Las Vegas for a business coaching franchise, I went on a tour at the headquarters of Zappos.com. It was an insightful visit that presented concepts that flew in the face of conventional business practices; yet, has allowed the company to achieve phenomenal growth.
In case you haven’t heard of Zappos.com, they started in 1999 and after making minimal gross sales their first year, they went on to earn $1.6 million in 2000 selling shoes online. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve rarely bought shoes online because it’s one of those things that you need to try on first and walk around a bit to make sure the shoes are a right fit.
Well, there must be a lot of people that don’t think like me because their sales continued to grow each year because their focus was on giving great service. CEO Tony Hsieh summarized a paradigm shift that helped reposition the company to achieve meteoric growth by stating: “back in 2003, we thought of ourselves as a shoe company that offered great service. Today, we really think of the Zappos brand as about great service, and we just happen to sell shoes."
A paradigm shift is basically a change from one way of thinking to another, sort of a mindset metamorphosis where individuals begin to think in a new and different way. The term was first coined by Thomas Kuhn when he argued that scientific advancement is a “series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions,” and those revolutions have “one conceptual world view replaced by another.”
With Zappos.com, it is a subtle shift in the ultimate purpose of the company, and the critical role everyone has as agents of service who are ready to go above and beyond the expectations of their customers. The company had a goal to reach one billion dollars in sales by 2010, and they achieved it by 2008. When I was there in November, they had just experienced their biggest day on Cyber Monday (a few days after Thanksgiving Day) by answering over 14,000 calls and making sales of $16 million in one day!
I have been a student and teacher of customer service for over 20 years. I developed the first accredited customer service course at Northern Marianas College, have written numerous articles published in the paper on the topic, and have worked with dozens of businesses to implement better service. And from my studies, I have concluded that most service training focuses on making external changes by training employees to smile more, use a person’s name, and behave in a certain manner.
Zappos.com and many other great service companies apply an inside-out approach to service by changing the mindset of its employees and instilling core values that help transform their culture. Values and culture are such an important component of the company, that they have a division that is called the Culture Department. In fact, our tour guide, Rocco, worked in the department and introduced himself a “culture magician.”
Extraordinarily successful companies have achieved paradigm shifts that have separated themselves from the competition and allowed them to achieve outstanding performance. Even though these mindset shifts are simple to understand, they can be very difficult to change in a company because it involves a change in attitude, thoughts, and behaviors that must start at the top and be sustained at the bottom. In other words, there has to be a cultural shift among everyone in the organization. I believe that the companies that will survive and continue to thrive are those that are currently implementing important paradigm shifts or who will learn to make them a part of their business in the future.
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