What’s Online

Shoe Seller’s Secret of Success

By DAN MITCHELL

Published: May 24, 2008
from NYT
HARVARD BUSINESS ONLINE posted a blog item on Monday morning praising the online shoe retailer Zappos. In short order, it spread around the Internet like kudzu.

Alex Eben Meyer

The item, “Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit — And You Should Too,” written by William C. Taylor, applauded Zappos for what he called its unmatched customer service and for its insistence on thinking beyond the current fiscal quarter (discussionleader.hbsp.com/taylor).

“There are plenty of companies with a hot product, a hip style or a fast-rising stock price that are, essentially, one-trick ponies — they deliver great short-term results, but they don’t stand for anything big or important for the long term,” Mr. Taylor wrote.

Not so at Zappos, which Mr. Taylor says will record $1 billion in sales this year, up from $70 million five years ago. Zappos delivers shoes, handbags and other products ordered over the Internet. Delivery is free and fast, and customers can return unwanted products at no charge.

“This company is fanatical about great service,” Mr. Taylor wrote, “not just satisfying customers, but amazing them.”

In an age of clueless, surly or impossible-to-reach customer service personnel, Zappos’s fanaticism helps it stand out. It is all in the hiring. After a few weeks of intensive training, new call-center employees are offered $1,000 on top of what they have earned to that point if they want to quit.

The theory, according to Mr. Taylor, is that the people who take the money “obviously don’t have the sense of commitment” Zappos requires from its employees. The company says about 10 percent of its trainees take the offer.

Zappos’s reputation preceded the Harvard Business item, of course. “Honestly, I’m getting to the point of burnout on hearing about Zappos in marketing circles,” Robert John Ed wrote on his blog (redmarketer.com). But he still felt compelled to note this week that “the secret to Zappos’s success is real commitment that permeates through every customer and every transaction, every time.”

GLASS CEILING Why are women having such a hard time achieving parity on Wall Street? John Carney (dealbreaker.com) wrote this week that the question persisted “despite some truly incredible efforts on the parts of Wall Street institutions to recruit, retain and promote women.”

Mr. Carney surmises that the gender gap in math and science may be responsible for the gender gap on Wall Street. That is not because of any deficiency on the part of women but because, on average, they are simply not as interested in math and science as men are.

“Could it be,” he asks, “that many women who leave Wall Street — or decline to show up there in the first place — are simply doing other things because they want to?”

LATE TO THE BANDWAGON Taco Bell’s latest online marketing campaign is not going over well with some bloggers. The campaign, “Why Pay Mo’ ” includes a depiction of four men dancing to a rap song, their heads replaced with pictures of a penny, a nickel, a dime and a quarter. “Yo, cuz,” the rappers implore, “go find some coins in your couch, O.K.?”

Viewers can replace the coin heads with pictures of their own. And a “rap name generator” asks, 1988-style, whether you are a “homeboy” or a “flygirl,” requests that you choose a menu item, then gives you a name like “Sir Biggie D-Dizzle Tak-O.” It is unclear what you are supposed to do with your new handle.

“Sorry, Taco Bell, but you missed the rap boat when Ronald McDonald got down with the homies in, like, 2003,” Angela Natividad wrote (adrants.com). DAN MITCHELL