Tony Hsieh Asian American Minority Role Model

Several weeks ago, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, agreed to respond to readers’ questions. Today is the fifth and final installment to those questions, here are the first, second, third, and fourth installments.

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

Also, feel free to jump to other parts of the interview found below:

Interview Questions from shmula.com blog readers
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 1
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 2
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 3
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 4
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 5

Comment by Rob on December 8, 2008 @ 2:51 pm

What are your thoughts on the thesis of that book “The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs”? Do you agree that eliminating the need for the customer to contact the company is a good thing?

I personally hate dealing with any customer service and wish that companies made it easier for customers to have good experiences. Having to call customer service is a failure in the company and is sometimes made worse when customer service isnt good. There can be two failures I guess.

I haven’t read that book, but I think it really just depends on what makes for a better customer experience. There are definitely cases where a self-serve model is a better customer experience, and there are times when it isn’t.

. . . the telephone, as low tech as it may sound, is also a great way of really connecting personally with customers. So that’s actually why we’re very different from most web sites that try to hide contact information.

We actually have our 1-800 number on every single page of our web site because we actually want to talk to our customers and when customers talk to us for five to ten minutes we have their undivided attention and that’s really the best opportunity to brand ourselves as a company that unlike most companies, actually wants to take care of our customers.

This is a 5-part series of interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com; the series can be accessed below:

And be sure to read our other leadership interviews: