Doctor Patient Relations

Zappos Service and Culture–Applied to the OD Practice

By Ken Krivacic, OD, MBA

SYNOPSIS

Online retailer Zappos is famous for its customer service. AnOD can learn from Zappos, including how to guide staff meeting discussions onimprovingpatient services.

EMPHASIZE CUSTOMER SERVICE. Differentiate your practice to benefit patients and employees.

DELIVER CUSTOMER SERVICE AFTER SALE. Don’t stop once sale has been made.
REFINE PRACTICE CULTURE.Set amission statement and identify core values.

We optometristshave a lot to learn from the way that shoes are sold online–by the most successful company ever to sell shoes online. In my practice, we adopted the approach pioneered by Zappos to focus on the customer. The Zappos model guides the kinds of employees we hire, the content of our staff meetings, the user friendly information on our web site and even how we live out our practice’s core values.

In the book “Delivering Happiness,” Tony Hsieh, one of the founders and current CEO of Zappos, describes how the company’s emphasis on customer service and company culture enabled it to succeed as a start-up and grow exponentially, even during hard economic times. As optometrists, we can learn from the Zappos’ emphasis on customer service that is so strong it benefits both customers and employees; its continuing strong service after sales have been made; and its understanding of how its internal culture impacts employee productivity, and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.

Zappos for the Optometric Practice

Powerful Phone Interactions
Zappos: Be positive and polite; show customer undivided attention.
My practice: Hire people who are naturally friendly and cheerful for receptionist position.

Customer Service King
Zappos:
Customer service is part of corporate culture.
My practice: Patient interaction experiences, good and bad, guide staff meeting discussion.

Detail-Oriented Service
Zappos: Once in a while customers will find surprises like free overnight shipping.

My practice: Our phone number displayed prominently at top of practice web site, and if patients call, we go the extra mile to ensure they’re satisfied.

Emphasis on Core Values
Zappos: Uses its core values to influence employee recruitment and training.
My practice: Focuses on employee buy-in, communicating frequently through internal e-mails and face-to-face meetings.

Zappos was founded in 1999 and has grown to become the world’s largest online shoe retailer. After minimal gross sales in 1999, Zappos brought in $1.6 million in revenue in 2000. In 2001, Zappos more than quadrupled their yearly sales, bringing in $8.6 million. In 2003, Zappos reached $70 million in gross sales and abandoned drop shipping, which accounted for 25 percent of their revenue base. The decision was based on supplying superior customer service, as Hsieh says, “I wanted us to have a whole company built around [customer service] and we couldn’t control the customer experience when a quarter of the inventory was out of our control.” In 2008, Zappos hit $1 billion in annual sales, two years earlier than expected (one year later, they fulfilled their other long-term goal, debuting at No. 23 on Fortune’s Top 100 Companies to Work For).
In the book, Hsieh credits a large amount of the company’s success on two areas: customer service and company culture.

Customer Service for Staff, Too

Hsieh felt that to be successful as a company, Zappos needed to emphasize customer service not only to all its customers, but also to all its employees. Hsieh says providing great customer service does three things: it makes customers happier, creates customer loyalty, and by doing so, leads to greater profits.
Zappos places importance on telephone interactions. Hsieh says even in this day of social media and integration marketing, the telephone is of utmost importance in representing and “selling” your business. “As unsexy and low-tech as it may sound, our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there,” he says. “You have the customer’s undivided attention…if you get the interaction right, what we’ve found is that the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tells his or her friends about it.”

For the optometric practice that means having enough staff to answer the phone and making sure that the staff member(s) answering the phone has the right personality for that position–someone with a good phone voice and a pleasing personality.

In my practice, we celebrate great customer service at our weekly staff meetings. We use online reviews from our patients as a source of feedback, and when these are shared in staff meetings, employees who did well are praised by the patient through the review and then by us as practice owners for providing great customer service. For the occasional bad review, we preface the discussion by telling our staff that we can use the review to learn from our mistakes and make corrections so we can provide better service going forward.

Emphasize Service After the Sale

Another area in customer service that Hsieh deems important is service after the sale. For example, Zappos does this by surprising its customers by upgrading to overnight shipping when a repeat customer has chosen ground.

An optometric practice could offer overnight delivery on all yearly supplies of contact lenses, or make a habit of delivering all glasses a few days ahead of when it promised them to the patient. These are small changes that could have a large impact on your practice’s reputation.

In our practice, a simple thing we changed that improved customer service was to move our telephone number to the top of our web page and display it prominently. How often have you found yourself on a company web site and have to search for a way to get in touch with them? After reviewing ours recently, we found that we had fallen into that same trap and moved to correct it.

Refine Practice’s Culture

The second area of business that Hsieh feels is important to company success is company culture.“Looking back, a big reason we hit our goal early was that we decided to invest our time, money and resources into three key areas: customer service (which would build brand and drive word of mouth), culture (which would lead to the formation of our core values), and employee training and development (which would eventually lead to the creation of our Pipeline Team),” he says. Hsieh says that company culture matters because it does three things: it makes employees happier, it creates more employee engagement, and it eventually leads to higher employee productivity.
Hsieh describes company culture as what your company stands for and eventually how others (customers and employees) view the company. He also defines culture as your core values. Zappos formally defined their culture by writing it down. This process according to Mr. Hsieh took years. The founders of the company had their ideas of core values but they also enlisted the help of their employees by having them write down what they thought the core values of the company should be.

This is a akin to an optometric practice creating, writing down and expecting employees to memorize and understand, a mission statement, or a list of core values.

10 Ways to Instill Customer Service

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, defines customer service in 10 steps:
1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.

2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary.

3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service…because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare.

4. Realize that it’s OK to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.

5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to up-sell, and don’t use scripts.

6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees, as well.

7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize.

8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.

9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about great customer service.

10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees and vendors.

 

Zappos uses its core values to influence everything they do. It starts in the hiring process as they look for people with a passion for customer service and then it continues with the training of employees as they come on board. Can you imagine having a list of core values that you present to a prospective employee and get their feedback as to if they would like to work for that type of company.
One of my practice’s values is gaining employee buy-in to everything we do. To live out this core value, we now communicate more frequently with staff through internal e-mail. We still have weekly meetings, but these internal e-mails help fill in the gap for things that cannot wait a week or for times when you want more immediate feedback on a situation in the office. A recent example was reaching our collection goals for the month of December. Staff was informed of our progress toward our goal by daily e-mails and it helped to keep them focused on insuring we met those goals.

Optometry is a service-oriented profession and we pride ourselves on being more service oriented and patient friendly than other professions. It would be wise to take advice from other companies–like Zappos–that value customer service highly.

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Ken Krivacic, OD, MBA,is the owner of Las Colinas Vision Center in Irving, Texas. To contact him: kkrivacic@aol.com.

 

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