Established in 1999, Zappos.com has quickly become a leader in online apparel and footwear sales by striving to provide shoppers with the best possible service and selection, with gross merchandise sales exceeding $1 billion annually.

In fact, the organizational culture is a huge part of every association's success. Company's culture and company's brand are really just two sides of the same coin. This analysis will take a deeper look at Zappos company culture and discuss how this culture transmitted and influenced its employees to maximize the productivity, and how to maintain that culture to create more revenue.

Signals from Zappos: Helping new employees socialize into the culture

At Zappos, it has special terminal and instrumental values based on their 10 core values. These values control the whole organizational members interaction with each other and also with the customers outside the company. The culture affects its organizational behavior significantly. Zappos applies these values to select candidate, training new hires in order to find the fit ones to grow and thrive.

Zappos emphasizes their value “Create fun and a little weirdness” and “be adventurous, creative and open-minded” by the hiring process during their hiring and training process thoroughly. Zappos leadership masters how to use the instrumental value convert to the terminal value. Within Zappos, they are looking for team players, and the employees are encouraged to make friends at work（a desired mode of behavior) . Friends in workplace and fun working atmosphere can create a positive influence, thus employees will initially bring the happy to their customers, and attract more repeat customers (a desired end outcome). Zappos utilizes the instrumental value help their organization to achieve its terminal goals.

At Zappos, culture is transmitted to its members by means of socialization and training programs all the time during the whole process. Many companies actually have core values, but they don’t really commit to them. Maybe you learn about them on day first of orientation, but after that it’s just a meaningless plaque on the wall of the lobby.

There are two different sets of interviews at Zappos. The hiring manager will do the standard set of interviews looking for relevant experience, technical ability, fit within the team. But HR department does a separate set of interviews, looking purely for culture fit. Candidates have to pass both sets of interviews in order to be hired. In fact, not every hired people make a high score on each core value, but they are not against any core value.

After hiring, the next step to building the culture is training. At Zappos, new hires go through the same training, regardless of department or title. They might be an accountant, or a lawyer, or a software developer - they go through the exact same training program, which is called pipeline. It is a process used to develop employees from entry level to the highest level of management. During this training, culture is transmitted to its employees by socialization. Employees learn the common understanding of how they should act in the organization or a situation.

It’s a 4-week training program, helping employees have a better understand company history, the importance of customer service, the long term vision of the company, philosophy about company culture — and then employees will actually work at CLT customer center, taking calls from customers. Again, this goes back to their value and belief that customer service value ”deliver WOW through service”.

During the training, Zappos offer everyone $2000 to quit, and it’s a standing offer until the end of the fourth week of training. This is an inexpensive way of getting rid of people who hasn’t the same norms with customer service principles and to have more committed people. This approach helps the company weeds out the uncommitted ones, and also makes its employees to believe their long-term vision and want them to be a part of their culture. Apparently, Zappos is forcing itself to do a good job filtering people on the front end, and creating a place where people want to work.

The remaining hours of the training, new hires will be taking a series of additional courses on communication effectively, coaching others, and managing stress to increase their interpersonal communication and personal management skills. Since the common values and norms have been built via the training program, and they are selected based on their personalities and characters, fewer conflicts will take place. The class “science of happiness“ based on the managerial skills helps employees to strengthen their relationship, decreasing the conflicts increasing the happiness in the work, and bring the happy, positive attitude to their customers eventually.

After having the systematic training approach, Zappos ensures that employees are learning at each stage of their career. a constant flow of employees of varying levels and skills in each department in order for people to constantly move forward and grow. For employees, pipeline helps build skills as well as their confidences in the following working, to achieve the purpose of pipeline “delivering happiness”.

Core value

1 Deliver WOW through service

“WOW” means doing something a little unconventional and innovative. Zappos encourages do something that’s above and beyond what’s expected. And whatever they do you must have an emotional impact on the receiver. At Zappos, Anything worth doing is worth doing with WOW.

The majority of Zappos' marketing comes from word of mouth. There is a very loyal customer base who recommends it to friends and family and almost always returns to buy another item. Mostly of these loyal customers are results from CLT employees working principles. They are fully empowered to serve customers. These customer service employees do not work from a script and are encouraged to use their imagination to make customers happy. They do not have to ask permission from a boss to give their customers the wow factor. By giving the impact to its consumers, Zappos has build brand loyalty and gain recognition among potential customers. As the innovators of this customer service strategy, Zappos has differentiated itself from others and goes beyond people’s expectation. Zappos won over 75% of sales from repeat customers, they succeed by delivering WOW.

Following up after each sale with a series of emails and the occasional phone call let zappos customers know how they care about them. It is a great way to keep in touch with existing customers, delivery happiness, and to let them know their importance to Zappos business. For example, an email wrote to a Renee about telling her order priority had been moved up, just because she appreciated zappos business. After received her order, a pair of shoes for her son’s, she was very happy when saw the exciting expression on his sons’ face.

Sending some unexpected goodies. Zappos understand the customer psychological activities. These gift don’t have to be expensive – perhaps checklist relevant to their purchase or a handwriting card. Don’t try to sell anything when you send these. Everyone loves receiving unexpected gifts and this is a great way to keep customers coming back for more.

2 Pursue Growth and Learning

Zappos has a culture book that is written by employees every year to make Zappo keep grow and develop. It details how people feel about the Zappos culture, the different from their competitors and how they reinforce and develop the culture every day. Statements attributed to employees emphasize and reinforce the Zappos culture. “We asked them to tell us what is different about it compared to other company cultures and what they like about the Zappos culture,” explained Roberson. The resulting responses were compiled and published—unedited—in a 450- page book.

Zappos provides tours of the company in Las Vegas. By the touring, Zappos could get directly information from the guest. It is a very straightforward way makes they can know their thoughts about their organization right away, and the touring will leave an deep impression to the customer. During the touring, they have an employee who organizes these tours. Tourists get to meet employees, marvel at the decorated work areas, observe daily business, and ask questions about the work environment and culture. It is a process to get the input and ideas to help the companies get to the next level.

The most strong symbol and artifact would be the increase of investments from venture capital from 2000 to 2005 and the financial statements of Zappos during 2007 to 2009.

Moreover, Zappos are willing to share their learning with others. Zappos Insights is a subscription-based online resource that Zappos developed in 2009. The site provides video interviews with Zappos senior management, articles, and other resources to share Zappos’ learning and the story of its growth. In Zappos’s opinion, learning and growing are seemed to be the only way for a company to survive in such highly competitive online market.

3 Build a positive team and family spirit

The zappos members talk about and identify the value of a teamwork culture. In Las Vegas, 80% of their job is to be social and interact with each other.Many of Zappos’ 10 core values were grounded in research on factors such as worker efficiency and productivity.

Study found that people were happier and more engaged in their work if they made friends on the job. As a result, Zappos encouraged managers to spend 10% to 20% of their time socializing with team members outside of work. Zappos workers work hard because they create an environment where they want to do well. They treat them with respect, treat them well, do extra for them, do whatever they can for them,”

Teamwork is rewarded and recognized. The lone ranger, even if a member is an excellent producer, is valued less than the person who achieves results with others in teamwork. Team members at Zappos are trained by department “qualifiers”—staffers responsible for awarding job qualification requirements (JQR) certification. “If you have a JQR, it means you are trained and qualified to do a particular job, such as receiving,”

“ “The company employed 700 “team members, “as employees were called. ” Apparently, Zappos treats every employee as a team member. All the employees considers as a whole team.

Subcultures Between CLT & Order Fulfillment

CLT Team

From its structure, call center holds organic structure. CLT members were authorized—even encouraged—to take as much time as necessary to assist customers with their orders, answer their questions, and troubleshoot their problems. CLT members take in charge of answering any questions of customers, contacting with the customers directly, and are considered problem-solvers.
Rather than those traditional call center operators, CLT members delivered “WOW” to customers by establishing personal, emotional connections with them, which make customers feel happy. CLT members were not evaluated using traditional call center metrics such as average call handle time or cost per contact. Also Zappos relied on customer feedback to evaluate its CLT members.
Since CLT members are focused and serious about the CRM, they believe in working hard and putting in the extra effort to get things done to spend as much time as possible. Besides, the CLT members in Las Vegas are more focus on socialization
This frequent socialization made them happy, and delivery happiness. By doing so CLT members are not only building the stronger relationship with current consumers but also increase the word of mouth to attract future customers.
Order Fulfillment Team

Different from the CLT structure, order fulfillment is more mechanism structure.
Order fulfillment members have to be able to do different jobs at different positions if needed. They are not rewarded by efficiency but by flexibility. They are considered performer.

They are trained by department “qualifiers” — staffers responsible for awarding job qualification requirements (JQR) certification. The more JQRs an order fulfillment member has, the more flexible he or she is, and the higher wage he or she receives.

Comparison

Although the Kentucky (order fulfillment) and Las Vegas (CLT) operations shared core values, such as” Be passionate and determined, ect ”. However, “do more with less” vary at the two different departments. There is a noticeable difference between the cultures of the two sites. In Las Vegas, 80% of their job is to be social and interact with each other. But the proportions in Kentucky are more like 10% social and 90% production in order to make sure orders go out.