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Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years

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Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years

#111

Post by ascendantlogic »

nkohari wrote: post #99
tjr225 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now. This is an easy thing to say as a customer or a customer success oriented person. I am leaving a support role just now. I am actually taking a pay cut to d…

> even if our problems are harder and more stressful. I suspect that you're going to catch some grief for this statement. :)

Any engineer that takes issue with that statement has never spent a day dealing with rude, angry customers and has no accurate frame of reference to draw up a response.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years

#112

Post by ascendantlogic »

meddlepal wrote: post #39

Worked with someone that had bought into the cult of Zappos as an HR/Head of People/Whatever the fuck you want to call it these days. They were gross. The happiness culture is toxic and if you don't buy into it and aren't projecting rays of sunshine 24/7 from all your orifices you're expected to just fuck off.

Going by your tone I'm going to assume you almost never project rays of sunshine from any orifices and maybe it's not their culture of happiness that's the problem.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years

#113

Post by flatline »

tjr225 wrote: post #98
betocmn wrote: post #44

I grew up in Brazil, where customer service was bad-to-terrible in 90% of the companies I had to deal with. When I moved to Australia, I thought it would be a lot better. It wasn't much different. When I joined a wine subscription startup in 2016 as the technical co-founder, I wasn't just building the recommendation engine. I was also helping to pack the boxes at the warehouse. We all got fascinated with Tony's book…

> Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now. This is an easy thing to say as a customer or a customer success oriented person. I am leaving a support role just now. I am actually taking a pay cut to d…

I was in a role to take customer calls for years, and did straight up support for a while early in my career. I found that if I took a genuine interest in their problems, and an interest in the individual, it turned a lot of bad attitudes around. Someone calls and is angry, frustrated with the thing we’ve made, it was my job to help them, not just fix the issue but feel happy with the product, too. That being said, there’s no helping some people, and some products may be too bad to rightfully support.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years

#114

Post by ryandrake »

1024core wrote: post #66
marcinzm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevada lacks the three laws/regulations which make California, imho, popular for entrepreneurs: * Limited non-competes * Limited IP assignment clauses * Limited anti-moonlighting clauses It's hard to start a business when your current employer can block you from doing so.

For a long time, it's been quite obvious that these 3 laws are a cornerstone of why California had the tech boom. And yet almost no other state has managed to put these on the books! I'd be willing to bet that if Nevada implements these (properly), they'll attract a lot more tech startups.

True for small tech companies, but major tech companies routinely flaunt CA loopholes to lay claim all sorts of employee-produced IP, and prevent moonlighting. If an invention is similar to something your company makes or might one day make (which could encompass anything for a major tech company), then they can lay claim to it and prevent you from moonlighting working on it.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years

#115

Post by asdasfasdfasdf »

meddlepal wrote: post #39

Worked with someone that had bought into the cult of Zappos as an HR/Head of People/Whatever the fuck you want to call it these days. They were gross. The happiness culture is toxic and if you don't buy into it and aren't projecting rays of sunshine 24/7 from all your orifices you're expected to just fuck off.

Have you ever considered that you might be the problem?

When I was younger I may have written a very similar comment about some places I've worked... and while I still agree that the environment wasn't my cup of tea... my intolerance of others was a bigger problem.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years

#117

Post by CarbyAu »

tjr225 wrote: post #98
betocmn wrote: post #44

I grew up in Brazil, where customer service was bad-to-terrible in 90% of the companies I had to deal with. When I moved to Australia, I thought it would be a lot better. It wasn't much different. When I joined a wine subscription startup in 2016 as the technical co-founder, I wasn't just building the recommendation engine. I was also helping to pack the boxes at the warehouse. We all got fascinated with Tony's book…

> Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now. This is an easy thing to say as a customer or a customer success oriented person. I am leaving a support role just now. I am actually taking a pay cut to d…

For me the biggest issue was authority/power on the Service Desk.

The worse cases are when the Customer Rep gets a problem from a customer they have little power to resolve. When you are:

- logging tickets to a black hole of "higher tier" support with no communication back to you.

- "chasing them up for the customer" aka by putting notes in a ticket

...you feel powerless.

Then when the next call comes in from the customer you begin to think "Why am I even here. I can't do anything..."

Customer Support need to see their efforts make a difference, just like most people, in order to be motivated to do it again.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years

#118

Post by quelltext »

nkohari wrote: post #99
tjr225 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now. This is an easy thing to say as a customer or a customer success oriented person. I am leaving a support role just now. I am actually taking a pay cut to d…

> even if our problems are harder and more stressful. I suspect that you're going to catch some grief for this statement. :)

Having experience in both roles (and some more, all on the technical end), I don't think so. Of course, it's not a simple harder/easier question and it doesn't apply to everyone but if you are good at supporting customers you naturally care about stuff and the customer's issues. You file an internal ticket, have to keep watching it but in many cases there's just no progress or even a response. Ultimately when there's a real bug you are just being an (internal) customer requiring support. The support quality of a company is not only determined by the right customer support employees or vendors but how good the internal support and escalation paths are.

As an internal engineer, when an internal ticket comes in I'm going to track down the issue, may realize it's a known thing that requires a lot of planning to resolve, loop in my manager, etc. but ultimately it usually ends with "we don't have time to address this right now and it doesn't affect enough users". If you're lucky there's a workaround that can be shared.

Now, I don't like that. I'd rather fix the issue for the user but I already have committed deadlines and team goals and it's rather easy to just go with a "sorry, we may revisit in Q1 or Q2 next year".

The support agent still has to a) deal with the customer's anger and b) cannot be honest with them, i.e. needs to wrap the situation in a blanket of corporate speak so as not to shed a bad light on internal teams / the company. At the end of the day they are just powerless and have to take on the responsibility in front of the user, whereas the engineer may feel unsatisfied not being allowed to spend time on it, but ultimately is far enough removed from the user to be actually affected by the situation. Granted, personally I always try my best to get a fix out but a lot of engineers would rather work on their projects and the managers want that too.

FWIW, when I did customer support I always reminded myself that nothing is personal. When I'm at the opposite end (a customer) I also don't get mad at the individual I'm dealing with unless they are not trying to understand or help at all.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years

#119

Post by deepGem »

tjr225 wrote: post #98
betocmn wrote: post #44

I grew up in Brazil, where customer service was bad-to-terrible in 90% of the companies I had to deal with. When I moved to Australia, I thought it would be a lot better. It wasn't much different. When I joined a wine subscription startup in 2016 as the technical co-founder, I wasn't just building the recommendation engine. I was also helping to pack the boxes at the warehouse. We all got fascinated with Tony's book…

> Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now. This is an easy thing to say as a customer or a customer success oriented person. I am leaving a support role just now. I am actually taking a pay cut to d…

I work closely with support teams and it's one of the toughest jobs in tech. I say toughest because it is stressful and the payoff for that stress isn't that high.

I still don't understand why companies treat support as a second class function to engineering. Engineering should in fact clamor to support to better understand customer issues and get them fixed and out of the way. I also find that support teams operate mostly on linear growth, meaning it is still a human scale problem. I don't see technology in the IVR/ticketing space innovating at the same rate as other areas.

IMO, the best alleviation for support is to avoid that customer call in the first place. Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call. It's a super hard problem to solve.

Needs something like StackOverflow for every problem domain, delivered over voice.

Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years

#120

Post by vandahm »

danielheath wrote: post #108
nkohari wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even if our problems are harder and more stressful. I suspect that you're going to catch some grief for this statement. :)

Not from anyone who has done both jobs, I suspect.

I used to be a software engineer at a nonprofit that handled a lot of customer care requests. I wanted to see what frustrated our users, and I also wanted insight into how we could better support the customer care team. So I talked to the volunteer coordinator, took a day of PTO, and worked a shift in customer care. (Because I did it as volunteer work on PTO, my boss and project manager couldn't tell me not to do it.)

Reader, working in customer care blows. It sucks hardcore. From my engineering work, I actually knew what the cause of the problems were and understood the timeline for fixing them -- information that real customer care reps rarely have available to them, but even that wasn't enough to appease some people. Even when people weren't rude, just the never-ending barrage of complaints and problems that I had to fix wore me down. And I only worked one shift, and then went back to engineering the next day.

People who can do this day after day, retain their composure, and somehow not burn out from the nature of the work are awesome, and they have my respect. Their jobs are absolutely more difficult than mine.

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