I Am CNBC Tony Hsieh Transcript

CNBC: How do you feel when you think back on that moment?
TONY HSIEH: I’m glad that my fingers were a little clumsy, and I didn’t hit the delete button fast enough.

CNBC:What do you think the message is there for other entrepreneurs?
TONY HSIEH: I would say that if you really believe in an idea and are passionate about it, then you should go for it.  I think historically, almost all the great things out there, all the great ideas or great businesses are ideas that at the time people thought were crazy.  You know, people thought that people weren’t going to pay four dollars for a cup of coffee. Yet, Starbucks is huge today.

CNBC: Were there times at the beginning when you thought you weren’t going to make it?TONY HSIEH:  I would say there were many times when we thought we were going to go out of business.  I think what got us through everything was that we had a really good team together, and we all supported each other.  I would say it’s really the company culture that got us through the hard times.  And if one person was losing a little faith, we had four or five other people there willing to bet everything on the future of the company.

CNBC: When you established the Zappos brand, a lot of people were doing websites that had the name “shoe” in it. Can you tell me about why you think that was bad idea and why you picked the name Zappos instead?
TONY HSIEH: Well, we didn’t want to limit ourselves to just shoes, even though we knew we were starting out focusing on shoes.  In the long term, we actually don’t even want people to know that we originally started out with shoes.  We want people to associate the Zappos name with the very best service and the very best online shopping experience.  And by creating a name that really doesn’t mean anything, it gives us a lot of flexibility as to what other product categories we can add over time.  I guess we always thought that we didn’t want to limit our options.  And while footwear was a very big industry and still is a very big industry, we definitely don’t want to be only about footwear in the long term.

CNBC:What do you want the Zappos brand to represent?
TONY HSIEH: We want the Zappos brand to be about the very best customer service and the very best online shopping experience, and that’s why we offer free shipping both ways, and if you order from us it’s not just free shipping, but it’s free overnight shipping.  We run our call center 24/7, and unlike most websites, we don’t hide our 1-800 number.  It’s in the top left corner of every single page of our website because we actually want to talk to our customers.

CNBC: I heard that when you were hiring people to man your call center, you had to "untrain" them?  Can you talk about your philosophy of what a call center should be like?
TONY HSIEH: We run our call centers differently.  We actually don’t have scripts, which most call centers do, so we encourage every rep to, using their own individual style, talk to the customer and try to connect with the customer in whatever fits their personality and the customer’s personality.  I think most call centers, are measured in terms of things like efficiency or how quickly they get the customer off the phone.  And for us, we think that’s a bad way of providing customer service, so we actually don’t measure call times.  We tell our reps to do whatever it takes to go above and beyond for the customer.  We'll even go so far as if a customer wants a specific shoe that’s not on our website, we’ll actually direct them to competitor’s website, not because we want to make money, because we aren’t, but just because we can be true to our brand of providing the very best service.

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