Would you find a pizza place for a customer or prospect?

Of course, not. Your customer service staff will tell the caller that's not what you do. That's what they do best. That's what you teach them. You reward them for being good students. You measure how quickly they can get to 'no we won't find a pizza place for you'. That's not a standard request. You've trained your staff to handle standard requests with no authority to handle non-standard requests.

What if...(you knew it was coming) what if you were guaranteed that you could grow your company from one with revenues of $1 million to one with revenues of $1 billion in 8 years...and all you had to do was 'find pizza places for your customers or prospects'. Just change your culture from one where you refuse to find a pizza place for your customers and reward your staff for doing so into one filled with employees who can do this on their own, at the request of a customer or prospect.

Could you do that? Would you do that? Would you existing staff and their rules and manuals agree to change if they knew these results awaited them?

Think about it. Watch this video of Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, while you think about it. It's 10 minutes long. (Would you watch a video 10-minutes long if you knew...) He talks about the culture of Zappos. It's the culture of Customer Loyalty. It's a culture that grew their business from $1.6 million in revenue in 2000 to $1 billion in annual revenue in 2008. Fittingly they reached that goal on Christmas Day, 2008. They did it by finding pizza places for their customers or prospects, even at 3-4 AM, in another city. Watch. Tony will tell the story.

So. Back to the question. Is the prospect of 1000-fold growth in your annual revenues within 8 years enough for you to find a pizza place for your customers. Or prospects?

Comments

[Andy Brudtkuhl]

He talked about that at SXSW - very cool