emergencemarketing.com

I had the pleasure to see Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com talk about the importance of corporate culture at the recent community 2.0 conference.

I was left with two new proof points for things that I knew were critical to a company’s success – the importance of hiring people who have a perfect cultural fit with the company, and the importance of customer service as a marketing and sales channel.

When you look at the Zappos.com corporate values, or read the corporate culture book (they ship it to you free of charge) – you are not left with that empty corporate speak feeling that you get when reading most companies’ belief statements. They mean something, and you can either associate with them or not. When they say “create fun and a little weirdness,” or “deliver WOW through service,” or “be humble,” or “build a positive team and family spirit,” or “build open and honest relationships with communications,” you can point to numerous people issues within many companies that are caused because the company does not foster or enforce a culture like that. In fact, they go so far as to pay people $1,000 to leave the company – and according to Bill Taylor, so should you. If people do not feel a 100% fit with your culture, make it easier for them to go…

The company is also a great case study for how you should treat your customer service department as one of the most important customer communication channels. At Zappos, they go as far as saying that customer service is their business. Even for non-retail companies, the lesson learned should be that customer service should be treated as one the most important touch-points of your company’s UI (user interface) through which customers experience your brand. In fact, and as McKinsey and Booz Allen & Hamilton have argued in recent articles on the change of the CMO role, customer service should be managed by marketing.

Now I need to buy some shoes, and it looks like I will be a loyal Zappos customer for a long time to come…

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