It is with a heavy heart that I write this blog post. Yesterday I learned that Tony Hsieh, the Asian American entreprenuer who built the online shoe retail giant Zappos had passed away in a house fire.
My first interactions with Tony’s message was through watching the video above where he gave a talk to the Google crowd. I found that his message of truly passionate customer service spoke to the heart of what we do in the real estate industry. Too many times in our industry we use that customer is number one as a punch line. But Tony isn’t like that, he built an empire based on that concept, and that truly great customer service in the key to winning in business. Given the passion he showed in the video, I bought his book Delivering Happiness and also some of his required reading such as the book good to great by James Collins.
A great example of what great customer service looks like was told by Tony in the above seminar. When a few of his colleagues were at a convention and they were looking for a pizza place late (like 2 am late) one night, he suggested that they call the customer service line of Zappos. Much to their delight, rather than hanging up on the customer by telling them that they probably shouldn’t dial a shoe retailer to look for pizza, the customer service representative actually connected them to the nearest pizza place that was still open. That idea of supreme customer service was so pervasive in his company that somehow a call placed by a customer to find pizza was answered with delight.
At exponential, we hope that we will get there. We hope that we can also one day have a culture so pervasive that weird calls to our lines will be handled with such grace as the reps from Zappos because Tony cared so much that he built an empire around it. RIP Tony and thanks for inspiring us. We hope to live up to your standards one day.
