Meet John.  He is a very friendly fellow that sits on the end of my row.  Normally he is a mild-mannered Customer Loyalty Representative but sometimes... well, sometimes he is turns into a regular ol' super hero! His velvet hat and shiny sunglasses along with a fleece cape with magical powers turn him into a WOWing machine. 

Disclaimer: This was a regular day at the office, not Halloween or any other sort of dress up day, just John pulling out his super-wower powers.

The Customer Loyalty Team is deeply sorry for the unusually long wait times to reach a representative yesterday afternoon. Half of the floor's phones went down. However, we tried to make the best of the situation while the phone lines were down. Someone cranked their tiny USB speakers and started playing “The Cupid Shuffle”.  Within seconds, a line of dancers formed in the aisle. This IS Zappos after all!

Unfortunately for the dance session, but fortunately for our customers, the ZCLT management team came up with a plan to move us to the other side of the building to continue to WOW our customers. Within a few minutes, we had our hold time back down, but we will always remember the good times of 5-25-11 and the legendary dance party that ensued due to the technical difficulties.

We'd like to thank all our customers for your patience yesterday! We really appreciate it.

This past year, we released a bunch of new features to the Zappos.com site. Some more obvious than others but our growing team got a lot accomplished and it was another amazing year for the Zappos Family. While we delivered on our internal timelines and optimized a lot of things on the site, one thing that we didn't do that well is have that conversation with you, our customer, on which site changes worked, which didn't and give you a heads up about new features that are being released in the future. In 2011, we'll be listening, watching and learning about what's working and what isn't and also telling you about site changes and new features we roll out. 

Listening. We've always had a great feedback loop at Zappos.com, through our conversations with you on our 1800 number (1 800 927 7671), facebook, twitter, blog comments, surveys and testimonials, we get a pulse of how you are doing and how we are doing. We're going to continue to listen to your feedback and be actively asking for your input on existing and new site features. Every comment is read, often multiple times, by different people and a lot of the feedback we get from you start discussions and define what we work on. Keep the comments coming because it's one way to inform the team if we're on the right track and doing the right things. 

Watching. In the past few years we've built out our research capabilities to better see what makes you happy and what makes you sad. Occassionally we'll roll out new features to just a subset of customers to see how they are received and interacted with. In some cases, we'll keep features and in others we won't depending on how things are received. In addition, if you stumble or are having problems with the site we send our team of sleuths out to investigate to find what went wrong and many times escalate that pain point as a project to fix as soon as possible. 

Learning. All of this is in an effort to better Learn how we can offer the absolute best online shopping experience possible and maybe even read your mind so that the next time you visit the site the experience will be even better than the previous. We haven't hired a psychic yet, but it's on our todo list. 

Telling. Finally, we're going to Tell you about changes on the site and at the same time introduce you to the team that's responsible for making those changes. As new features roll out, look out for our new feature kitty,

that will let you know that we have a new feature on the site. You'll have access to a survey about the feature to give feedback and a blog post describing the feature showcased by the developers and designers that worked on it. 

So, if you're a long-time customer or brand new to the site, let's continue to have that conversation and build that relationship until we're one of those couples that makes our friends uncomfortable. We're looking forward to it! ;) 

Sincerely, 

Alex  

FEZ (Front-End Development) and UX (User Experience) Manager

Michelle and Millie from the Southwest Airlines communications team went for a ride in the Blogbus at the 2010 Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas. Check out how they keep employees happy through a vibrant culture and more importantly, how they keep Southwest customers happy through service in the video below:

Zappos CLT, Inc. hosted a Graduation ceremony for the team members that just completed their incubation training . It was a time for everyone to take a break from their day and congratulate the newest members of the Zappos family for all their hard work.

Ever wonder what the Easter Bunny does the other 364 days a year? Works at Zappos.com, of course. Check out his new single, "Core Values Bunny"