Will Amazon go Zappos, or the other way around?
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Earlier this year, when Amazon bought Zappos, there was some concern from faithful fans of the shoe-selling website -- would its famed, topnotch customer service survive the purchase? Amazon may make buying easy, but trying to get a customer service representative on the phone is something else.
In the Sept. 14 edition of the New Yorker, on stands now, Alexandra Jacobs goes inside Zappos and tries to get a handle on its upbeat, sometimes goofy corporate culture, spending time with its visionary Chief Executive Tony Hsieh.
The Customer Loyalty Team, or C.L.T., is the nerve center of Zappos, whose thirty-five-year-old C.E.O., Tony Hsieh, has earned a zealous following by imposing an ethos of live human connection on the chilly, anonymous bazaar of the Internet. He talks about being the architect of a movement to spread happiness, or “Zappiness,” via three “C”s: clothing, customer service, and company culture. “Eventually, we’ll figure out a way of spreading that knowledge to the world in general, and that has nothing to do with selling shoes online,” he told me after I visited the company over the summer.
The piece provides an interesting snapshot of the company, a good portion of it shortly before the Amazon deal was announced. There are hula hoops and an internal singing team and Christmas lights and shots of vodka at Claim Jumpers -- the idea being that people in customer service should be enjoying themselves. ‘We’re having a great day at Zappos!’ one CLT member answers a call, fully meaning it. ‘How can I help you?’
But how this will merge with Amazon’s corporate culture is yet to be seen. As one potential hire tells Jacobs, ‘Everybody’s wondering what’s going to happen now. It’s going to be so big. I hope that Amazon will take what Zappos has and not the other way around.’
-- Carolyn Kellogg
