The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW

From my perspective, customer expectations are easily evaluated in terms of those that are predicted and those that are normative. By predicted, I am talking about realistic, practical, or anticipated outcomes that emerge from personal experiences, reported experiences of others, and sources of knowledge such as the media. In essence, predicted exp

Consistent with Tony Hsieh’s perspective, “wow” is an important dimension of customer loyalty and should be pursued. The first step in that pursuit is achieved by making sure you are simply “getting it right” (delivering exactly what customers want the first time you serve them) and “making it easy” (reducing the overall effort required for custome

Chapter 4 Ideas to Run With Reducing customer effort increases customer loyalty. It is difficult to wow customers unless you execute on the basics of service. Service implies that a service provider will make a customer’s life easier. Customer ease does not just happen. It has to be designed into the customer experience. In order to meet the wants,

a number of businesses (like Zappos) are shifting from a performance approach to a growth and development model.

Amy Smith and Ruth Bolton, published in the Journal of Service Research, shows that a company’s recovery from mistakes has substantial impact on customer perceptions and on the future purchases of those consumers. Research indicates that customers who experience a service breakdown and receive a swift, helpful resolution are more likely to recommen

from a customer’s perspective, loyalty is less about delivering to your word and more about what you do when you don’t deliver. It’s what we do that 0.1 to 1 percent of the time when we screw up that really matters.

In their book Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees up to Speed in Half the Time, George Bradt and Mary Vonnegut define onboarding as “the process of acquiring, accommodating, assimilating and accelerating new team members, whether they come from outside or inside the organization.

Falling in love with an applicant’s skills can predispose some companies to settle for a less-than-desirable or even toxic personality.

As business leaders, we would be wise to assume that service velocity is something our customers are always either consciously or unconsciously assessing.