This sounds like a forced exit. For the founder and CEO and basic Messiah of the company to leave with 0 days notice, and for the incoming CEO to be sending the notice, sounds like someone got their email terminated and walked off the property. Even CEOs who are fired for company performance sometimes get to send their own farewell letter: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/mar/01/grou...
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
141–150 of 178 posts
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call How companies should do this: provide self-serve options for most things. Make the status of a long-running transaction transparent. Fix issues that cause people to call in the first place. How companies actually do this: IVR>You can find self service options on our Customer> 0 IVR> .. site to check your ... Customer> 0 IVR> ... transfer funds and ... Customer…
Precisely. I get that a large portion of the population just wants to pick up the phone and call but that can be totally avoided with so many messaging outlets today.
On the one extreme you can offer voice based support - Just blurt out your question to the phone, system does speech -> text and answers your question. Super super hard.
Interim at least you can offer support on Whatsapp/Facebook where someone can actually ask a question and get answered - a much better version of the chat bots that exist today.
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#143I 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…
Agree with you. Apart from rude customers, sometimes you face below problems (mostly process/org related)
- limited decision power. Many times even though you genuinely want to help customor you can't because of it.
- have to cover up others' lies like sales people etc
But still, I would recommend having support experience (atleast a month)to developers. It will change your attitude to solve problem. What really matters to customer is not fancy tech-stack or shiny interface but working service.
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#144Thanks for the shoes. They served me well.
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#145Does anyone know how his "The Downtown Project" (aka Vegas revitalization) is going?
I can't speak to how well the project has been doing, but just last week I happened to listen to his 2014 Long Now Foundation talk on this project. I didn't even know who he was before this talk, which was simply next in my podcast feed for this subscription. Maybe the ideas he espoused aren't universal to US areas, but I found plenty worth mulling.
https://longnow.org/seminars/02014/apr/22/helping-revitalize...
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#146I want to also counter-balance the negativity towards Hsieh with my own experience. From 2015-2017, I worked at Edmunds.com which was (to put it lightly) a bit obsessed with "Delivering Happiness" and Zappos' culture. So much so, that the leadership team visited Vegas to get a tour of the Zappos HQ (this was before I joined). But Edmunds based their entire cultural approach, including hiring, interviewing, and onboar…
> We seem to forget that people are inherently social and need a sense of belonging. As someone who used to work at a company that also was fairly well known for its 'cultish' culture, while I agree with your statement above, I also strongly believe that the modern corporate workplace is fundamentally incompatible with the sense of social belonging that humans need. Worse, many smart people take advantage of this nee…
Second this and i'm glad you described it so well. No matter how hard most companies try to create an atmosphere of "family" for their employees, it fundamentally rings hollow almost all of the time, and by definition it has to for exactly the reasons you stated. These are organizations that exist to make money for themselves and their owners/investors, not to support their staff through thick and thin, bad or good (as a family or tribe is almost morally obligated to).
Any employee who isn't a total fool should know this and the executives certainly do because they have to to keep their efficiency numbers and bottom line looking decent. So any claims to the contrary just sound forced, false and absurd because that's all the are, the employee equivalent of some corp also expressing loving platitudes to its customers
Example: during the pandemic I've seen several major banks and other corporations send out emails and publicity material with phrases like "we're all in this together" scattered around it..... Yeah. as if my own experience as some random individual customer or employee with limited resources and all sorts of personal struggles in any way relates to their main concerns as a multibillion dollar corporation.
So yes, comparing almost any company except a literal extended family business or a small startup staffed by a group of close associates and friends working together to a tribe or family group is empty nonsense 99% of the time.
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#147I 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…
Also in Australia. That's exactly the same strategy I used growing the initial version of 99 Bikes ecommerce store. CDBaby was also a big influence.
+1 for the CD Baby reference. Derek's book Anything You Want is maybe my all-time favorite business book. I still remind myself to "Treat every customer like Mick Jagger" when replying to customer emails.
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#148Earlier 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…
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, t…
Ah true. Last thing I did before leaving a support role - in a company that regretted hiring support people in EU and was actively driving us out of the door - was indeed this.
This customer had become aware of the MTTR metric driven bouncing around with his tickets and was playing cat-mouse.
I got this lost-cause chore as a good-bye (sarcasm) gift and it took me 1h to study the problem (at that stage, a PIP offense) identify the issue and report the bug, respond to the customer with a well-written apology, confirming that they were correct and a bug tracker id to follow.
Customer was very pleased they were finally escalated to the adult in the room ;)
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, t…
Ah true. Last thing I did before leaving a support role - in a company that regretted hiring support people in EU and was actively driving us out of the door - was indeed this. This customer had become aware of the MTTR metric driven bouncing around with his tickets and was playing cat-mouse. I got this lost-cause chore as a good-bye (sarcasm) gift and it took me 1h to study the problem (at that stage, a PIP offense)…
Care to elaborate on why regretting customer service in the EU?
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never seen a note in my zappos order. Have I been inadvertently throwing away these notes for years?
I haven't either. Is it possible it's a "this is a gift" option?
It seems so. According to their blog post about it, they're writing cards specific to the life event - birthday, get well, etc.