Remodelers Advantage Business Summit Day 1: Jonathan Wolske, Zappos Customer Service. Building a culture of service

Rob Koci is reporting from the Remodelers Advantage Business Summit in Henderson, Nevada. He’s down there with some 35 Canadian renovators in a contingent of almost 400 renovation professionals.

Here’s his report on one of yesterday’s seminars.

Jonathan Wolske started at a call centre. He was hitting 30 and he was desperate. Now he is at Zappos Customer Service.

Zappos all began with a shoe. The founder of the company was looking for a shoe and, though he knew what he wanted, he couldn’t find that shoe anyway. So he started to sell shoes online. The company’s warehouse is now 1 million sq ft. In 2004, they moved their service element to Las Vegas. They were eventually bought by Amazon but still operate independently. They have 1,500 employees now, working out of the old city hall building in Las Vegas.

The focus of the company since 2005 has “company culture.” They want Zappos to be a great place to work. They’ve succeeded, because they have been voted one of the 100 best places to work in the United States by Fortune magazine. Growth has been phenomenal.

So, what is “company culture?”

It’s the “attitudes, feelings, values and behavior that characterize and inform a group and its members. There is a culture anywhere people work together.”

“We wanted a list of committable core values that we were willing to hire and fire on,” Wolske said. “If we weren’t willing to do that, then they weren’t really ‘values’.”

They ended up with ten core values:

1. Deliver WOW through service.

2. Embrace and drive change.

3. Create fun and a little weirdness.

4. Be adventurous, creative and open-minded.

5. Pursue growth and learning.

6. Build open and honest relationships through communication.

7. Build a positive team and family spirit.

8. Do more with less.

9. Be passionate and determined.

10. Be humble.

Wolske explained how these core values have been pulled from a year-long effort to understand what exactly are the core values of the company.

“The values are actionable,” he said. “Culture defines who you are, not what you do.”

Tips for your renovation company:

1. Hire for culture, not just skill.

2. How lucky do you feel you are in your life?

3. Review fit/alignment with culture (how is the team living the culture?).

4. Fire for culture (toxic is toxic).

5. Make rules where they are needed, but guidelines for everything else. (Treat adults like adults and they will behave like adults.)

6. Provide continuous feedback.

7. Who is responsible for the culture? Everybody. The leader has to lead, but everyone has to be involved.

8. Create a culture of service. Service is not a department, it is the entire company.

9. Wow customers (external)

10. Wow each other (the internal customers)

11. Wow your suppliers and business partners. (Everyone is a customer.)

12. The most powerful customer service tool is your brain.

13. There is a need to consider experience, not the function.

The work is the easy part, Wolske says.

Here are the facts about what this kind of company culture has done for Zappos:

51 percent lower turnover

50 per cent less safety incidents

66 percent decrease in sick leave

125 percent less burnout

33 percent higher profit

43 percent more productivity

37 percent higher sales

300 percent more innovation

75 percent return business

40 percent of new customers were told by someone else about Zappos

Repeat customer orders up 2.5 times for the year