Good User Experience Starts with Good Employee Experience

A few years ago I was enjoying brunch with some friends at the Tavern at Lark Creek, which is rightfully known for excellent food and attentive and friendly service. Part way through the meal I had to excuse myself to use the bathroom. The bathroom was up some windy stairs, and was very nicely appointed, even more nicely treated than the dining room itself. As restaurant bathrooms go it was very pleasant, but I did not give it much thought.

At the end of the meal before hitting the road for a slightly long drive, I decided to make another pit-stop. This time I saw a downstairs bathroom, which was not as nice as the first one I had used upstairs (thought it was not by any means unpleasant). It became clear that I had taken a wrong turn the first time and had used the employee bathroom.

I could have chosen to be miffed that the restaurant didn’t ensure that the guest bathroom was as good as it could be. Instead, I realized that the quality of the employee bathroom was one sign that the restaurant cared for its staff, and recognized that taking care of the EX - the employee experience - is a prerequisite to a consistently high quality UX - user (customer) experience. They realized that “customer centric” does not mean ignoring employees. In fact it’s just the opposite, if you want to offer truly good service to customers, you need to start with treating your staff right.

As Olive Garden President David Pickens puts it, “It’s very difficult for the experience of the guests to exceed the experience of the staff.”

When you look at the company’s that consistently deliver superior UX - Zappos, Amazon, Google, Southwest, Starbucks back in the old days, Levenger, Niemen Marcus, the one thing they all have in common is that they pay huge amounts of attention to the quality of life of their staff, creating a culture and infrastructure of training that help their staff do the right thing, even when there isn’t an exact rule about what to do in a novel situation.

As an extreme example, read the letter that Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh wrote to employees when the acquisition by Amazon was announced. It is manically focused on the culture of the company and the worklife of the staff, superseding just about every other concern. “Culture” shows up 23 time in it, 7 times in association with “unique”, and 21 times with “brand”. In other words, Hsieh makes an intimate connection between the internal culture of the company and the external brand as it appears to customers - he recognizes that the EX is directly correlated with UX.

Brand Consulting Disruption

I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about the divergent nature of so many companies: one company finds itself under threat from completely unexpected quarters as those other companies diverge out of their established domains. (I prefer Gary Hamel’s word “domain” rather than industry because, as he points out, the boundaries are so blurry today that thinking in terms of industry or category is falsely comforting and limiting.) This one is a doosey: Zappos is going into the brand consulting business.

Adweek writes:

Over the past few years, executives from dozens of companies, including Southwest Airlines and Best Buy, as well as ordinary customers, have made the trek to see its operations up close. The tour has undeniable Zappos touches: each department has its own greeting, and in-house motivational guru Dr. Vik has visitors sit in a throne for a Polaroid snapshot.

Now the company hopes to turn the intense interest in its culture and approach to business into a moneymaker. This week, it plans to roll out Zappos Insights, a subscription video service that lets companies ask questions about the Zappos way and get answers from actual Zappos employees. It will charge $39.95 per month for subscriptions.

The Zappos Insights site is up, but is mostly locked down for subscribers. About the only thing I could find public is the reading list. Overall things look pretty sparse, and they don’t have much preview material so you can get a sense of what you’re paying $39.95 a month for, or how well their Zappos-centric experiences scale to other businesses. But if it’s like buying shoes from Zappos they’ll have a pretty flexible subscription policy so you can try it out without much risk.

Still, who would have thought that brand agencies would find themselves competing against a shoe retailer? Sure, Zappos advice is not going to be tailored in the same way, but heck it’s several zeroes cheaper and for the “Fortune One Million” size companies they are targeting, something adequate is better than nothing. And that’s the very definition of a disruptive play.

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Hat tip: Steve Portigal

Update on Monday, December 22 by Adam

Just saw that Joshua Michele Ross at O’Reilly has written about Zappos also offering a syndication of an end-to-end customer service system also:

I am fascinated by what I see as Zappos’ ongoing evolution from a simple, online retailer to a leading online innovator. A few months back I wrote about Zappos pioneering what I called “Experience Syndication” with their Powered by Zappos (PBZ) service. In brief, PBZ syndicates the end-to-end value of shopping with Zappos - from the online store experience to shipping, to returns, to the call center - everything. Clarks Shoes, Stuart Weitzman and many other online sites are providing a customer experience entirely syndicated by Zappos.

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