Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years

footwearnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–178 of 178 posts

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

#171

Post by SeerKlein »

dfxm12 wrote: post #167
Gracana wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a customer, it's a painful experience when you realize the support people are in this position. I can't be mad at them, they're friendly and personable and they at least pretend to want to help, but it's obvious that they're unable to do anything useful. At a certain point (around the third three hour phone call, in my experience) it feels like they're mocking you with their saccharine lies, and I begin to loathe…

I can't be mad at them, they're friendly and personable and they at least pretend to want to help, but it's obvious that they're unable to do anything useful. I wonder if companies are relying on your empathy. They want you to realize this and just close tickets before they're resolved. Like the service desk's primary directive is to get customers off their employer's backs. If they happen to fix an issue along the w…

I think you're on to something. I've been working for as a contractor for a big health insurance company and that seems to be the impression for the purpose of my job: "Get the customer off the phone as soon as you can."

In more polite terms, "Try to escalate the ticket by 15 minutes if you haven't resolved the issue."

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

#172

Post by SeerKlein »

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.

This is what irked and continues to irk me about working in a customer support position. When I was going above and beyond for customers, customers would go out of their way to let my boss and others know that I was their hero. However, what did that get me? A shallow, perfunctory reply that "the [redacted] department was lucky to have me" and to keep doing great work! When I'd meet with my boss or get feedback, they'd basically shit on my numbers.

As a consequence, I eventually gave in and decided to improve my numbers to see how "well" i could do. I was able to cut down my times to about a third of a normal agent, but that also resulted in me being more robotic and much less of a human to the customers.

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

#173

Post by dvt »

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #161
dvt wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 need for a sense of belonging with the sole goal of making more money for rich people.…

>there's value in making your employees feel welcome and wanted More like there's more value in making your employees feel welcome and wanted by feeding them Kool-Aid, rather than paying them well.

For what it's worth, I got paid on par with FAANG.

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

#174

Post by InfiniteRand »

quelltext wrote: post #118
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. :)

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…

I work in a senior support role and I am constantly telling my juniors not to take things personally.

Funny thing is I used to take things personally and it did occasionally lead to me going the extra mile to save the situation, but it is just so emotionally exhausting, to the point where I do not think it is humanly possible to maintain that level of service (I suppose some one might be able to, but I have not met anyone like that).

A part of me misses that do-or-die personal commitment to the customer, but for the most part I enjoy not going insane

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

#175

Post by saagarjha »

cafard wrote: post #165
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…

In his In Love with Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery , Wilfrid Sheed wrote that a guaranteed route to success for any company would be to put its intelligent people on the phones and hide the morons in management where they can do only limited damage. I wish I could remember the context.

I thought the morons were already in management. That’s why they don’t invest in customer support, right?

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

#176

Post by Syntaf »

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…

Preface: I love Vegas and feel strongly about my experiences at UNLV so forgive my passion. It is my own opinion at the end of the day.

As someone who grew up, went to school, and worked in tech in Vegas, I place some of the blame on UNLV and its computer science program.

The computer science curriculum taught at UNLV is designed to do nothing more than churn on casino gaming employees; it's so extreme that the only web development course doesn't even count towards your computer science degree. It's absolutely bonkers to me how students are trained from the start to feed right into the golden handcuffs of the casino industry and yet people wonder why Vegas can't get it's tech industry started.

There's just simply no local talent pool here as a result. The casino industry is, in my opinion, a solved domain with little innovation room for incoming passionate engineers. I remember applying to a big gaming company here for an internship while at UNLV, and they legitimately couldn't provide a clear answer to "How often do you innovate within your domain, and what are some examples".

I feel fortunate that I had already found an interest in topics outside the gaming industry and managed to land a job here for a tech company constantly moving the needle in a challenging domain.

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

#177

Post by blnqr »

prawn wrote: post #110
blnqr wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question, and you hit it squarely: Hsieh and company did not invest the $350 million (!) as originally announced https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/07/17/15645/zappos-ceo...

For just part of $350m, you could comfortably bankroll 20 small businesses to effectively create the dynamic you wanted. Couple that with some drawcards to lure tourists across, free travel, etc. That would've worked.

You got that right, 20 startups or even 200. And they might have made a great return. Instead, they focused on bars and public art (which I think is cool btw) and made a fundamental real estate mistake by loudly announcing where they were going to buy and how much they had to spend.

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

#178

Post by blnqr »

Syntaf wrote: post #176
blnqr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Preface: I love Vegas and feel strongly about my experiences at UNLV so forgive my passion. It is my own opinion at the end of the day. As someone who grew up, went to school, and worked in tech in Vegas, I place some of the blame on UNLV and its computer science program. The computer science curriculum taught at UNLV is designed to do nothing more than churn on casino gaming employees; it's so extreme that the only…

You are totally right about this (and thanks for sharing your personal perspective). I used to think the CS program at UNLV was excessively backward or old-school, which it is, but the root cause is those golden handcuffs. What company do you work for in LV? If we should take it offline, I am bo@blnqr.com
Post reply on HN