I Am CNBC Tony Hsieh Transcript

CNBC: Can you talk about what your rates have been on returning customers?
TONY HSIEH: On any given day, about 75% of our purchases are from repeat customers, and that’s really been how we’ve grown the past eight years.  It’s really primarily been from repeat customers and word of mouth.  We don’t spend a lot of money on marketing.

CNBC: How does that make you feel that people are coming back?
TONY HSIEH: It's great, and that’s really how we measure our success.  We don’t necessarily look at the financial numbers first.  We look at how happy our customers are, how often the come back, and how often they tell their friends about us.

CNBC: How do you know they’re telling their friends?
TONY HSIEH: Oh, when a new customer comes to our website and buys for the first time, we ask them how they heard of us, and the number one thing, aside from the response “internet,” is some sort of word of mouth.

CNBC: When you talk about having people who can make a connection with the customer, how do you find those people, how do you hire them, and what did you do to create the company culture?
TONY HSIEH: I guess the main thing is really just to try to look at how the person thinks about life and what their attitude is.  We don’t actually care that much about their previous experience.  We would rather have someone with no experience but a great attitude and a desire to provide the best service than someone who has ten years experience but doesn’t have that same attitude.

CNBC: What did  your views on customer service have to do with your company's move to Las Vegas?
TONY HSIEH: The company actually was started in San Francisco, and we moved to Las Vegas about three years ago.  The reason for that move was because it was hard finding people that wanted to provide customer service as a career in San Francisco.  Most people in San Francisco view that as just a temporary job, whereas Las Vegas has a lot of call centers. It’s a 24/7 city, and because our call center was our fastest growing part of the company, we decided to move the entire company out here.  I guess we could have done what most companies do, which is just have a call center open somewhere remote and have headquarters still wherever the headquarters is, but we decided to move here with the company, because if the company was really going to be about customer service, we really needed to be where the customer service was happening.

CNBC: Has is worked out?
TONY HSIEH: Yes!  Las Vegas has been great.

CNBC: I heard you’re a poker player?
TONY HSIEH: I play occasionally when I have time.

CNBC: Was that a plus moving to Las Vegas?
TONY HSIEH: I’ve actually played a lot less poker now that I’m in Las Vegas than when I was in San Francisco.  I think part of it is just it’s always available, so it’s not as appealing as it used to be.

CONTINUED

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