How Zappos created a best-in-class customer and employee experience

If delivering a great customer experience is challenging when you’re face to face, tackling customer concerns over the phone takes things to a new level.

Any contact center agent will tell you this is no small feat. Long wait times, multiple transfers and a flurry of miscommunication can frustrate both ends of the line. When customers are increasingly stressed, agents are expected to dial up their empathy to keep first-call resolution stats high—even when call volumes skyrocket at peak periods. It’s a demanding role that requires resilience and strong customer service skills.

So, it’s no surprise that contact centers have one of the highest turnover rates across industries, a considerable cost for organizations. 

This begs the question: Must the industry accept high turnover and related disruptions to the customer experience as business as usual? Rob Seifker, Senior Director of Customer Loyalty at Zappos, wouldn’t dare.

Seifker leads one of America’s best customer service organizations and knows what it takes to create a stellar employee experience that positively impacts customers. He spoke to Axonify’s Chief Learning Architect JD Dillon about three ways how Zappos overcame the contact center stigma and built a successful customer service organization from the inside out. 

1. Establish organizational values (but don’t expect them to flourish on their own)

To really shape and guide your culture, core values have to be more than just a page in the employee handbook and a poster in the break room. According to Seifker, core values that aren’t reinforced over time simply won’t stick.

• Walk in their shoes. Frontline employees often make up the majority of a company’s workforce, so an important part of building a strong and resilient culture is recognizing and valuing the work they do every day. One of the best ways to instill empathy across the organization is to ensure experienced frontline workers populate every department. At Zappos, contact center career paths are clear and managers are promoted from within the company. Seifker himself started out as a temporary employee answering phones and now directs hundreds of contact center agents. 
• Make room for fun. Try not to get so caught up in output that you neglect the well-being of your employees. Seifker explains: “Time is always the enemy of a call center. We try to make sure we hire above what the baseline staffing needs would be, so that we have a little bit of extra bandwidth for cultural things.”  
• Take it to the top. Culture is everyone’s responsibility, but to be best-in-class, you may have to reimagine the way work is done within your industry. To make these kinds of strategic changes, you need the right level of investment, which means buy-in has to be ingrained firmly at the leadership level.

2. Your team doesn’t always have to stick to the script

Design the contact center role to deliver on your own unique vision of a customer experience, rather than satisfying traditional metrics. Focus on hiring great people and giving them the tools and freedom to do their jobs effectively. Hiring talent and then restricting their performance doesn’t benefit you; it leads to agent dissatisfaction and turnover.

Because Zappos appreciates the connection between the agent role and its brand vision, it enables frontline teams to deliver a great experience while still coloring within the lines. For example, the company doesn’t impose a strict time limit for agents to get off the phone—it’s more important for them to connect with customers and provide a positive experience.

3. Leverage continuous training as a tool to build company culture

At Zappos, every new employee goes through the same great training experience, whether they’re headed to the contact center or the engineering department. Right off the bat, every employee is aligned with the company’s strategic focus on the customer experience, and they all have opportunities to speak with customers directly.

And learning doesn’t end when onboarding is complete. Continued training and communication are built into the daily workflow to ensure agents are always prepared for what comes next. This commitment to continuous learning helps managers focus on the most important parts of their roles—making sure employees feel comfortable, safe and confident navigating new on-the-job challenges.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to creating an exceptional employee experience. For Zappos, it takes an ongoing blend of unique and meaningful mindsets, values and tactics tweaked and perfected over time. Regardless of your approach, one thing is always true: the customer and employee experiences are deeply connected and investing in your agents and managers will have a significant impact on your bottom line.