Blog Bites Man

Robert Stephens, CEO and founder at Geek Squad, delivered the second keynote at Customer Service is the New Marketing (yesterday’s blog post about the first keynote).

His comments echoed much of what Tony had to say about creating a great company culture. Although his talk touched on customer service and experience, it actually largely touched on brand — as in the marketing kind, not the kind a company gets over time based on it’s products and services. I was surprised how much time he spent at a conference about customer service talking about what ties the Agents wear and what cars they drive.

Marketing on the soles of his shoes
If I had to boil down what he said into three points, they would be:

Be yourself. In a time where Web 2.0 design has hijacked most website’s brand look and feel, companies like Geek Squad (and SmugMug acknowledged the value of looking different at the Crunchies) smartly swim against the tide. The retro police detective schtick works well. The brand is everywhere, including in the Agent’s shoes, tie, shirts, socks, and die-cast badge.

Put your brand at every step — literally. Because Geek Squad buys outfits for their Agents, it made sense at some point — the point at which it was cost effective — to make custom shoes. But not just any shoes. These shoes supposedly have a reverse imprint of the company logo on the soles of the shoes.

Robert did the math, too — people step an average of 7,000 times per day, he said. Multiply that by the number of Agents on the street, you possibly get some killer guerrilla marketing with each step.

There’s no way to measure the ROI, of course. What are the odds the shoes will make an imprint on any given day… and will anyone see it… and will it have any effect? But since they have to purchase so many shoes anyway, and since the cost was not that much more to create the imprint, it seemed like a good idea.

It’s time to grow up. He sold Geek Squad to Best Buy. In one fell swoop — hiring, training, and customer acquisition solved. Hiring — it exposes Geek Squad to gadget geeks shopping at Best Buy. Training — Geek Squad Agents also get a nice discount at Best Buy so they can try and test and learn the gadgets that they’re eventually going to have to support. Customer acquisition — customer opportunities walk through the door every day.

While you can’t put an exact value on this branding, it demonstrates Geek Squad’s ability to think different, to utilize every part of their vast workforce, and to do it all without incurring excessive costs or time.

There were three themes that were reiterated again and again at the Customer Service is the New Marketing conference in SF today:

1. Open, transparent, and honest conversations are important
2. Empowering community is the best way to scale
3. Make a real big effort to help your customers; even if you don’t always succeed, people appreciate that you’re trying.

Keynote about culture

Probably the most riveting presentation was the keynote delivered by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. Tony kept reiterating the idea of creating a great culture of service. Zappos is not a company with a mission to sell merchandise, it’s a company built to offer great service. They just happen to sell shoes.

Now, that may appear obvious to people reading this. Of course you focus on providing great service. But that’s not what most companies do. Most companies focus on making the sale. Service is frequently usually an afterthought.

Most companies focus on new customers and lead generation, but here’s a case where service is the lead gen device. Good service means repeat customers and word of mouth. Zappos tries to get more repeat customers, not necessarily new customers. That’s a different lead gen strategy! In a commoditized world like shoes, service is the differentiator. Their sales and growth to-date would seem to support that focusing on service was a good choice.

How do you foster a culture of great customer service?

Creating the right culture is what keeps Tony up at night. Not sales, not merchandising, not operations… culture.

To address culture, everyone in the company — whether you’re in sales, service, or merchandising — everyone, gets 5-weeks of training. It includes immersion in the culture, core values, customer service, warehouse, and more.

What are those core values? He listed the company’s 10 core values. I jotted down about half of them, the ones that struck me as particularly innovative:

#1. Deliver “wow” through service
The word “wow” was borrowed from the things their customers tell them. Customers repeatedly begin their emails with the word. They’re amazed at how Zappos lives their promise of fast and no-questions-asked customer service. Zappos took this idea and built it into their core values.

Waitaminute. Zappos took what customers were saying and put it into their core values. That’s a powerful way to reinforce a cool thing and it makes a statement to employees how powerful their customers are. Wow.

#3. Create fun and a little weirdness
Being different makes them more memorable, a fun place to work. Maybe most importantly, it makes it easier to recruit the “right” people. More of the right people helps ensure the culture will thrive.

#6. Build open and honest relationships with communities
Honesty, transparency, openness was a theme throughout the day.

#10. Be humble
He’s the CEO? That’s exactly what I thought when Tony first took the stage. He was unassuming and a little bashful. Then he revealed this 10th core value and it made a lot of sense. He was so un-CEO-like (ie, humble) that I could see the company walked the talk, from the CEO on down.

Putting your money where your mouth is

The last thing I’ll mention about Zappos:

Most call centers train their employees to hang up the phone as fast as possible; answer the question, then hang up. Not so at Zappos. Zappos’ call-center reps are not measured on call time.

They don’t often like hiring people with call center experience, because it means they have to retrain them. They’d rather hire people that believe in providing excellent customer service. Because no one is measured on call time, Zappos is perfectly content to let a call center rep stay on the phone with the customer for over an hour… even if a sale doesn’t result from the call.

That’s smart.