Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 7:18 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#152

Post by eecc » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 8:19 AM UTC

danmaz74 wrote: post #149

eecc wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Salary. It’s much cheaper to outsource a “cost center” to a country where employees have passable proficiency in English and costs of living that are significantly lower...

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

#153

Post by rimliu » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 8:49 AM UTC

asdasfasdfasdf wrote: post #115

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.

Have you considered that he may not be the problem? It is known by now that too much sugar is bad for you. And for someone not raised on American diet of the dumb smiles and constant fake positivity that diet is indeed vomit-inducing. That comment may simply reflect the experience and frustration felt in such a place, it bears no indication how the op was acting there.

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

#154

Post by piokoch » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 9:25 AM UTC

deepGem wrote: post #119

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…

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…

Very true, there is a very good blog post by Joel Spolsky on that: a good support person will spot recurring technical and report that to devs. Some offshore "consultant" support or badly paid "call center person" does not give a crap about product quality; more, such support has no incentives to provide any meaningful feedback, as the more support incidents gets reported, the more money they earn.

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

#155

Post by lozaning » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 9:42 AM UTC

all_blue_chucks wrote: post #79

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…

How do you measure your customer support staff performance? Many companies fire employees for having "low numbers" but since they can't measure tone, they end up driving their reps to optimize for other factors.

When I used to work support in global escalations for a big multinational, my manager, nor his, ever knew what to do with me.

I maintained a 100% flawless NPS/satisfaction survey rating the entire time, but my mean call time was also nearly triple that of everyone else.

I helped far fewer people, but the ones that I did help I frequently ended up actually educating, resulting in nearly no repeat calls.

Management could never come up with a purely zendesk based overall performance metric I wasn't near the bottom of. I never much cared because at least weekly a customer that I helped would try to convince me to quit and come work for them as a private consultant, making it incredibly hard for my manager to convince me I should change anything at all about what I was doing.

I left after 3 years and shortly after the whole thing got outsourced to an Alorica call center. So I guess management did figure it out, they'd rather have 4 people who's only qualification is the ability to fog a mirror, giving out near worthless support very quickly, than pay for 1 person like me.

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

#156

Post by user5994461 » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 9:50 AM UTC

ascendantlogic wrote: post #111

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. :)

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.

I remember some time in support, most customers weren't rude. It's boring calls to register on the service, moving out to a new address, or confirming identity.

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

#157

Post by user5994461 » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 9:58 AM UTC

lozaning wrote: post #155

all_blue_chucks wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you measure your customer support staff performance? Many companies fire employees for having "low numbers" but since they can't measure tone, they end up driving their reps to optimize for other factors.

When I used to work support in global escalations for a big multinational, my manager, nor his, ever knew what to do with me. I maintained a 100% flawless NPS/satisfaction survey rating the entire time, but my mean call time was also nearly triple that of everyone else. I helped far fewer people, but the ones that I did help I frequently ended up actually educating, resulting in nearly no repeat calls. Management cou…

I'm curious how come you didn't move to a customer if customers were offering to hire you every week?

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

#158

Post by pontifier » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 10:27 AM UTC

blnqr wrote: post #71

geophile wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I visited maybe 4-5 years ago. I had just read about Hsieh, and his business philosophy, and his attempt to revitalize downtown Las Vegas. It was ... odd. My immediate impression was favorable. A very quirky looking area -- a small outdoor mall, with the buildings framing a little courtyard area. Built out of shipping containers, or something that looked like that. But the businesses. Each one was quirky in the extre…

BLUF: it takes more than one man with a vision to create a tech ecosystem. It takes rich nerds who want to invest locally and stick around. Las Vegas will never have that. I have lived in Las Vegas for 24 years. We moved here to raise a family because it is my wife's home town. (Her father was a scientist and manager with the federal government.) I was and am in tech, working from home except for two years with one o…

When I visited Vegas a few years ago I tried to find some tech or entrepreneur events. It was strangely barren compared to what I had been used to in Utah. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was just too spread out? Too many other things for people to do? There was a desperate feeling I couldn't shake...

Money, money Everywhere, but not a dime to spend.

Anyway, I've just left Utah forever, and live in Arkansas now.

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

#159

Post by chiefalchemist » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 11:17 AM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #134

mdorazio wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy. Don't compete on price. Compete on long-term customer value.

Customers will pay a premium if they think you’re going to take care of them. That’s basically the business model of REI; they rarely have the best prices, but if something breaks they’ll make it right.

My ecomm rule is:

"Doubt is a dealbreaker."

Whether the question is returns or something else. Few will open their wallet if they have doubt. Unlimited and free returns removed a large amount of doubt. If fact, as mentioned, it likely triggered more sales.

You'd have to spend a significant amount of marketing budget to get what Zappos did from their return policy and customer service. Those weren't expenses, they were investments.

This actually applies to all relationships.

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

#160

Post by wink » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 11:29 AM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #156

ascendantlogic wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember some time in support, most customers weren't rude. It's boring calls to register on the service, moving out to a new address, or confirming identity.

If telephone support is the final option after email doesn't work, I feel entitled to be angry. That doesn't mean I have to be rude, but I let the call center person now that I am fucking angry if I wrote 2 emails/support tickets already and they haven't solved the problem.