A little while ago, CX Unplugged's Mary Anne Ghobrial sat down with Alex Genov, the Head of Marketing Insights and Customer Research at Zappos Family of Shoes, to discuss customer service, behavioural psychology, capturing data and so much more.

Alex, thanks so much for joining us today.

It's wonderful to be here.

So I think everyone who's passionate about customer service has heard about your team at Zappos. Tell us, what is the internal brand ethos at Zappos?

One story kind of defines this whole ethos, and it's a story of a customer who bought shoes. It was over 21 years ago, for a special occasion and the shoes did not arrive on time. She was very disappointed and wrote to Zappos. What they did was they went out of their way to make it right.

They overnighted the shoes to her and apologised profusely and sent her a gift card. Then they got back an email from her. And the subject line is wow. Now every company talks about wowing customers, but it was a big thing back then.

And so Zappos decided to have customer service and this customer care be the defining characteristic of the company. Because they said, you know, people can buy the same shoes at Nordstrom at many other places. And now, Zappos is a customer experience company that happens to sell shoes, so more than just customer service. So that, that gives you a glimpse into what Zappos is about.

You also recently co-authored a book called Forget the Customer, See the Person. A very interesting title that I think hits home for a lot of professionals in the customer experience space. Tell us a little bit about what it's about.

Thank you, thank you for bringing it up. When we set out to write this book, we had two main goals. One was to help people think a bit differently. The other part was to give them the tools to do something about that. Nowadays, there's this obsession, I would say, with big data, data science numbers, and that is a very technology oriented, if you will. And I think now people are so enamoured with this idea that software and algorithms and big data will solve everything.

So we set out to provide a counterpoint to that, and to say, of course, technology is awesome, our lives have changed for the better because of that. But if the balance is disturbed, and you focus only on that, and you forget that your customers are people, then then businesses will suffer and customers will suffer. It's a matter of balance.

On the topic of balance, there's been a lot of digitization over the past few years in contact centres especially. And everyone is very focused on creating new digital strategies. However, how do we balance human and technology?

Many think it’s very counterintuitive to really invest in customer service when all other companies are saving that. But consider the cost and the risk of treating Customer Service employees as second hand employees. That translates into unhappy employees treating customers in a certain way that that is not optimal, right?

We flipped it around and said, ‘We're gonna hire the best of the best for customer service’. So we moved operations to Vegas, because it's a city that never sleeps. People who are perfectly happy working other jobs all night long now had another option to be customer service reps. The customer service floor was the best floor on the in the Zappos tower.

It wasn't the C suite with the best floor. It was the customer service agents. So that is an example again, of balancing and focusing on individuals rather than technology.

Can I just say that I've seen I've seen some recordings of the customer service floor at Zappos, and I've seen things like record players on people's desks and all these posters. It’s a very fun vibe, like everyone’s been told to make this your home, make this your own personal space.

That's absolutely right. One of Tony Shea's kind of genius ideas was he talked about work life integration. He didn't talk about work life balance. It’s about integration. The whole idea of hiring at Zappos was to hire nice people. You know, fun, cooperative people that don't not only want to work with but you want to go and have dinner with drinks with. You spoke earlier around the numbers.

We talk a lot around reporting on numbers and on profit margins. So what happens is, a lot of times organisations start to see customers as dollar signs. But that doesn't work when you want to build customer trust. So what's your take, when it comes to seeing the customer as an actual human, which they are?

Absolutely Mary, I think that that is the that is the main point of this is nowadays, it's much harder to create a product centric way of running a business. There’s a lot of excellent businesses that are based on product centricity, but if you want to build customer loyalty, and to build that long time, relationship with the customer, you do need to build trust.

The way Wall Street works is this: you have shareholders and they demand numbers, they demand results, the results are actually numbers. And you have to deliver every three months, which makes it very difficult to really think about customers as people. But companies that can see the customer as a person and have the vision to that will be much more successful because it is that at the end of the day, it is about trust. You know, over the years, when we prioritised customer service, Zappos was giving up a lot of profit, right? We were we were eating up a lot of that we're taking on that burden for the customer sake.

But Zappos never spent a lot of money advertising. But now it's a well known brand because people talk about it. People told others, and then other companies heard about Zappos and they wanted to tell other countries and so on. So that's the word of mouth.

What about personalization? What are your strategies behind personalising the customer journey?

I would say personalization is critical. Again, when you want to build emotional connection with the customer, and you want to have them really say wow, and stick with you. And I think the golden standard there would be knowing customers better than they know themselves. So when you offer something to a customer, they say, Wow, how did you know?

An analogy I like to use, again comes from psychology and interpersonal relationships, which is gift giving: What do you give to somebody who you don't know anything about them? You give them cash, right?

But let's talk now about your significant other. Let's say your spouse of 20 years. What's going to happen if you take out cash and say, Honey, go buy yourself some nice? You need to give something that's of that's of sentimental value, right? Because you know them, you know something about them. You've done your research.

What about the data factor?

Yes, customer data is important. But for customers that that trust you, the personalization should start with a question, and that question is: Can I use your data to personalise the experience to you? It’s about giving and taking. So you take data from customers, but how are you using it? Are you using it to look out for you or to give you something in return versus to improve your business operations?

So when we talk around customer experience, you've made the interesting point in the past that experience is an emotion and we can evoke an experience but not necessarily create one.

So how can us brand ambassadors and CX advocates really evoke positive emotion for our customers?

I think it's arrogant to think that you can create an emotion in somebody. Oh, we created this watch, and everybody's gonna love it. Right? They're gonna love it. Like whenever they touch it, they'll love it. I think that's arrogant. You can't know if people will love it.Some people will hate it.

So experience is an emotion and I think what we need to realise is that if we know our customers really well, and if we care about them, and if we have their best interest in mind, and we create products based on that, then we have a chance to evoke an emotion. How do we measure emotion in our customers?

One of my favourite definitions of emotion is that it's a combination of concepts, ideas and what makes an emotion or a few things. There are facial expressions, that overt behaviour, like running, the internal state, and then there's psych.

We have really cool technology nowadays, one of the closest things we get is the facial expression. The face doesn't lie. I mean, it's very primal, and shows emotion. There's really cool technology that measures as you're watching ads or something like this, your facial expression and codifies it into basic emotions. And we've done research in the past with strapping people with what looks like lie detector equipment.

And so then you see them, you know, the physiology getting riled up, right? And then some people are more expressive, outwardly, and some people are more expressive in terms of the physiology, so you kind of need to measure both.

Then you combine it with other things, and you put it together and then you have a better idea of what people are feeling.

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