...Strayer University Brickell, FL Campus Assignment for Course: | ZAPPO Corporate Culture | Submitted to: | Dr. Eleanor Marschke | | | | | Date of Submission: 10/23/13 | Maria L Delgado | SU200046104 | Mayito259@yahoo.com | 1900 N. Bayshore Drive #2007 Miami, Fl 33132 | 786-333-8222 | | Title of Assignment: | | CERTIFICATION OF AUTHORSHIP: I certify that I am the author of this paper and that any assistance I received in its preparation is fully acknowledged and disclosed in this paper. I have also cited any sources from which I used data, ideas or words, either quoted directly or paraphrased. I have added quotes whenever I used more than three consecutive words from another writer. I also certify that this paper was prepared by me specifically for this course. ------------------------------------------------- Student’s Signature: ______________________________ ------------------------------------------------- Instructor’s Grade on Assignment: Instructor’s Comments: Zappos Organization description Zappos can be described as an unconventional organization for its nature of being one of the most transformational business success stories of our time. It is an internet company that began by offering shoes online and went from virtually no sales to $1 billion in annual gross merchandise sales over a 10 year period, despite minimal advertising. Company offers...
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...Zappos Case Study Introduction Zappos is a successful company with a unique corporate culture and impressively low turnover rate. This case study explores the human resources strategy employed by the company, focusing first upon the significance of the environment upon human resources. The paper then identifies how the Zappos strategy fits within the human resource management model. The final section discusses the core strengths and weaknesses of the Zappos HR strategy. While the Zappos human resource practices are characterized by many strengths, they could be improved by enhancing the accountability of managers responsible for conducting performance appraisals and inviting a greater degree of employee feedback into the appraisal system. Both of these relatively small opportunities for change are consistent with the company's overall company culture. Environment and HR The external environment plays an important role in determining the direction of a company's human resources strategy. "An organization's strategy must be appropriate for its resources, environment circumstances, and core objectives. The process involves matching the company's strategic advantage to the business environment."[1] Companies develop networks with external entities, such as customers, suppliers and investors, which must be cultivated to ensure longevity.[2] Human resources must ultimately support the business with practices that will enable it to interact and compete within the surrounding competitive...
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...CASE 10: Zappos—They Do It with Humor When Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh was the featured guest on The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert grilled him about the company's success and customer loyalty. Hsieh replied that it's Zappos's goal to deliver WOW" in every shoe or clothing box. The company is consistently ranked highly as one of Fortune's "Best Companies to Work For Amazon's Jelieoris liked Zappos so much he bought the company. Customers First Zappos's relentless pursuit of the ultimate customer experience is the stuff of legend. The company offers fast shipping at no cost and covers return shipping if you are dissatisfied for any reason at any time. The Zappos brand is less about a particular type of product and more about providing good customer service. Hsieh has said, We could be in any industry that we can differentiate ourselves through better customer service and better customer experience7 Culture to Thrive In Success at Zappos begins with the company's culture and the unusual amount of openness Hsieh encourages among employees, vendors, and other businesses. 'Uwe get the culture right," he says, "most of the other stuff like the brand and the customer service-will just happen... . We want the culture to grow stronger and stronger as we growf Named "The Smartest Dude in Town" by business magazine Vegas In4. Hsieh believes employees have to be free to be themselves. That means no call times or scripts for customer service representatives, regular costume parties, and...
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...Introduction Founded in 1999, Zappos.com has quickly grown, increasing from almost nothing in gross merchandise sales in 1999 to over $1 billion in 2008. This fast growth is due to their focus on providing the absolute best service and the absolute best shopping experience. The Zappos family currently staffs over 2,050 people. Their fulfillment center stocks more than 3 million shoes from over 1,136 brands, and it is complemented by a 24/7 customer service center located at the headquarters in Henderson, Nevada. Zappos offers free shipping on both orders and returns and a 365-day return policy. Clearly, their customer-first approach is working, since 75% of their customers are repeat buyers. Zappos’s Background In 1999, Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn approached Tony Hsieh and Alfred Lin with the idea of selling shoes online. At that time, Tony Hsieh was running an investment company funded from selling his previous company, Link Exchange. Link Exchange was founded by Tony Hsieh and Sanjay Madan in 1996, one year after both graduated from Harvard. Microsoft acquired Link Exchange for $265 million in November 1998. After Link Exchange was sold to Microsoft, Tony Hsieh and his old friend from Harvard, Alfred Lin, founded the venture capital company Venture Frogs. Through Venture Frogs, located in San Francisco, they started 27 companies, which were offered space in Hsieh and Lin’s 15,000 square feet of rented office space. In 1999, Hsieh received a voice message from Nick...
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...Social Media Marketing BUS508: Contemporary Business November 30, 2013 What is Social Media Marketing? Why has Social Media Marketing become so popular? Is it now the most effective way to advertise and market? I have chosen to first define both marketing and social media. In my analysis it will allow you to fully grasp the importance and meaning of marketing and social media. My analysis will also allow you to easily determine why Social Media Marketing has become so popular among businesses. I’m a big believer in social media so I will display that throughout my paper. With technology in this day and age people always have the Internet in the palms of their hand and social media is always a button away. What is marketing? Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large (Boone & Kurtz, 2012). Without proper marketing strategies businesses would not be able to sell their goods and services. The most effective rule to consumers is to ensure that they always get what they want and always meet their needs before they ever surface. Marketing has always been part of business, from the earliest village traders to large 21st-century organizations producing and selling complex goods and services (Boone & Kurtz, 2012). How people market has now evolved and is now more on social media than ever. Social media is one of the...
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...Developing a Culture of Leadership Development Preamble Leadership has been defined as “the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation while operating to accomplish the mission and improve the organization” (Sewell, 2009, p. 93). Arguably, it is this type of effective leadership that is the requirement of every high functioning organization. In order for an organization to achieve high levels of leadership success, an organization must foster and sustain the correct environment, provide the correct tools and supports, and ultimately ensure that culture supports the development of future leaders from within. It is the focus of this paper to provide an overview of the valuable elements and techniques supporting cultural development that will lead to effective leadership development for any high functioning organization. The Leadership Environment In developing a culture for leadership development, an organization must understand its inner workings, specifically the existing culture of the organization. “A culture can be defined as the norms, practices, history and values of an organization — in other words: ‘how things are done around here.’” (Osak, 2014, p. 1) These subtle nuances will help to share the thoughts, values and behaviours of organizations employees. Values “Values are what support the vision, shape the culture and reflect what the company values. They are the essence of the company’s identity – the principles...
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...HBR.ORG THE PRICE OF INCIVILITY LACK OF RESPECT HURTS MORALE AND THE BOTTOM LINE. BY CHRISTINE PORATH AND CHRISTINE PEARSON January–February 2013 Harvard Business Review 115 The Price of inciviliTy R udeness at work is rampant, and it’s on the rise. Over the past 14 years we’ve polled thousands of workers about how they’re treated on the job, and 98% have reported experiencing uncivil behavior. In 2011 half said they were treated rudely at least once a week—up from a quarter in 1998. The costs chip away at the bottom line. Nearly everybody who experiences workplace incivility responds in a negative way, in some cases overtly retaliating. Employees are less creative when they feel disrespected, and many get fed up and leave. About half deliberately decrease their effort or lower the quality of their work. And incivility damages customer relationships. Our research shows that people are less likely to buy from a company with an employee they perceive as rude, whether the rudeness is directed at them or at other employees. Witnessing just a single unpleasant interaction leads customers to generalize about other employees, the organization, and even the brand. We’ve interviewed employees, managers, HR executives, presidents, and CEOs. We’ve administered questionnaires, run experiments, led workshops, and spoken with doctors, lawyers, judges, law enforcement officers, architects, engineers, consultants, and coaches about how they’ve faced and handled incivility. And...
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...Customer engagement Customer engagement (CE) is the engagement of customers with one another, with a company or a brand. The initiative for engagement can be either consumer- or company-led or the medium of engagement can be on or offline. CE aims at long-term engagement, encouraging customer loyalty and advocacy through word-of-mouth. Online customer engagement is qualitatively different from offline engagement as the nature of the customer’s interactions with a brand, company and other customers differ on the internet. Leveraging customer contributions is an important source of competitive advantage – whether through advertising, user generated product reviews, customer service FAQs, forums where consumers can socialise with one another or contribute to product development. Customer engagement is about encouraging your customers to interact and share in the experiences you create for them as a business and a brand. When executed well, a strong customer engagement strategy will foster brand growth and loyalty. NEED: CE-marketing is necessitated by a combination of social, technological and market developments: 1. Businesses are losing the power to dictate the communications agenda 2. Decreasing brand loyalty BUSINESS TO BUSINESS CONTEXT: Customer Engagement in a B2B (business to business) marketing context would typically include a collection of the following marketing programs: 1. Customer Advisory Board or Council 2. Customer Reference Program 3. Executive Sponsor...
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...Johnson, Lattrice lattricejohnson@yahoo.com Johnson, Lattrice lattricejohnson@yahoo.com Mgmt 591: Leadership and Organizational Behavior Professor Ken Mgmt 591: Leadership and Organizational Behavior Professor Ken Course Project Reducing Turnover Rate Course Project Reducing Turnover Rate MGMT 591: Leadership and Organizational Behavior How to decrease employee turnover rate? Overview of Organization The organization that will be the topic of discussion in my final project paper is Amazon.com. Amazon.com is an American international electronic commerce company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest Internet based company in the United States. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified, selling DVDs, VHSs, CDs, video and MP3 downloads/streaming, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry. The company also produces consumer electronics—notably, Amazon Kindle e-book readers, Kindle Fire tablets, Fire TV and Fire Phone — and is a major provider of cloud computing services. Amazon has separate retail websites for United States, United Kingdom & Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India and Mexico, with sites for Sri Lanka and South East Asian countries coming soon. Amazon also offers international shipping to certain other countries for some of its products. In 2011, it had professed an intention to launch its websites in Poland, Netherlands...
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...one of the largest problems for many organizations, yet it is one of the most unknown cost. Although employee turnover may not seem like a big deal, it is very expensive part of the business. A study done several years back showed that less than 50% of businesses had a plan to determine what turnover was actually costing them. A majority of businesses simply went on intuition alone to determine turnover cost (Blake, 2006). With a competitive mobile workforce it is crucial for businesses to figure out what turnover is actually costing them. It is also important for businesses to have a plan in place to improve retention. By doing this they can maximize their profits and retain the talent they have worked so diligently to recruit. In this paper I will discuss how much employee turnover really cost businesses in detail and are businesses really acknowledging this as an issue. There have been several studies done to estimate the actual cost of losing an employee. In one study I found it showed that employee turnover cost are different based on the position held, for example the cost to replace an entry level worker is much different than a management position. However, when we look at the overall cost it is staggering how much it really is. In an article I found there were three categories in which it broke down the actual cost to replace an employee and I listed them below (Blake, 2006). [pic] 1. Entry level employees cost 30-50% of their annual salary. ...
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...July 2012 BRANDGYM RESEARCH PAPER 6 By David Taylor Managing Partner Can social media show you the money? www.thebrandgym.com Can social media show you the money? About the research The first part of the research was with over 100 senior marketing professionals across Europe, Africa, Asia, the USA and Latin America, covering a broad range of sectors. In addition, we did research with 1000 consumers each in the UK and USA, to compare their actual use of social media* with how marketers think they use it. Read on to see how wrong most marketers are! We have brought to life the findings with examples from our work on brandgym projects, and through interesting case studies we have come across in our blogging and book writing. * To clarify, this study focuses on the creation of content using social media (e.g. Facebook pages, Twitter feeds) and not online advertising on social media sites. In this, our 6th global survey, we ask “Can Social Media Show you the Money?”. The brandgym partners Introduction Social media is a red-hot topic today. Social media is sexy, shiny and new. And it’s also a bit scary, with headlines screaming that the whole world of marketing is changing, and that ‘old’ media like TV advertising is dead. However, data on the brand and business building effects of social media is thin on the ground. We felt it was time to cut through the hype and hysteria around social media, to better understand the role it can play. We wanted to find out: “Can social media show...
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...ARTICLE 1 How to Create Superstar Employees: Beyond Work-Life Balance Robert Pagliarini What does Tiger Woods have to do with your happiness and productivity at work? Surprisingly, quite a bit. Tiger Woods recently dropped out of golf's top 10 world rankings for the first time in 14 years. His descent has shocked the golf world, but it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. As much as we try to separate work from life, they are inextricably linked in powerful ways that we are just now realizing. If you have a job, or if you are responsible for managing or hiring employees, you need to understand the Tiger Effect. Most companies are operating in the dark ages when it comes to supporting their employees, and they are missing a huge opportunity. There are three kinds of employees: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen and those who wonder what happened. What kind of employees do you want? Your goal should be to discover how to create superstar employees -- the not-so-technical term for those employees who are more productive, creative, loyal, satisfied, entrepreneurial, who call in sick less often, stay with the company longer, provide greater discretionary effort and who are able to leap over ordinary employees in a single bound. But isn'ts this what organizations have been trying to do? Of course. They invest billions of dollars and spend countless hours teaching their employees how to become better leaders and managers, how to be more efficient and productive...
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...Creating a Customer-Centered Organization A Harvard Business Review Insight Center Report sponsored by The HBR Insight Center is an interactive resource that highlights the emerging thinking around today’s most important issues. In this installment of the series, Harvard Business Review focused on how managers are turning their companies into customer-focused organizations. The growing obsession with customer excellence is driven, in part, by technology. Today customers can obtain and exchange more information about the good and bad of their encounters with companies than ever before. That gives companies a great incentive to work harder to make customers happy — before, during, and after their purchases. © 2011 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. Harvard Business Publishing is an affiliate of Harvard Business School. Creating a CustomerCentered Organization A Harvard Business Review Insight Center Report CONTENTS 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 Create Brand Superfans Matthew Rhoden How Philips Uses Net Promoter Scores to Understand Customers Suhail Khan What Zipcar Can Teach the S&P 500 Stephen Wunker How Fidelity Used Design Thinking to Perfect Its Website Frederick S. Leichter The Coming Point-of-Sale Revolution Grant McCracken Using Mobile Phones to Capture Customer Experiences Emma Macdonald, Hugh Wilson, and Umut Konus How to Play Marco Polo When Setting Prices Rafi Mohammed Beyond Mass Customization B. Joseph Pine II Understand...
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...Class Discussion: Students will respond to the following: · How have entrepreneurs been impacted by the global economic crisis? · What excites you about being an entrepreneur? · What concerns you about being an entrepreneur? How have entrepreneurs been impacted by the global economic crisis? Entrepreneurs have been hit since the downward slope of the economy. The banks have stopped and/or made the loan process more stringent to receive funds and to continue business. Some entrepreneurs found investors to receive funding where they were able to get around receiving loans from banks. · What excites you about being an entrepreneur? The exciting attributes of being an entrepreneur is setting your own standards. Creating jobs for the community and putting resources back in the community served. Leaving a legacy for the next generation and giving young people an opportunity to learn a new skill and concepts. · What concerns you about being an entrepreneur? The concerns revolve around not having the resources to continue running the business. The product or service rendered is no longer needed and not having the technology to advance. The business failing because of bad decisions that were made. 1. The global economic crisis has negatively impacted many entrepreneurs. Those who began their businesses during better times have found themselves in severe financial trouble. However, the downfall in the global economy has also presented a...
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