Every few months a new business, marketing or lifestyle book makes an appearance around the office and we get the opportunity to expose ourselves to someone else’s point of view and ideas. The most recent book that caught our attention is Tom Hseih’s book “Delivering Happiness”. Tom is the CEO of Zappos.com, an incredibly successful online shoe company. The book includes his inspiring stories regarding happiness as a business model. Here’s two main points that I took away from it…
Happiness is the key…!
…To everything in life and more specifically to this book – it needs to be the foremost in your mind with business. Although I almost hate to agree to this, but you must also understand that money doesn’t necessarily mean happiness. True – I love money, as I’m sure you do – but it is not top of the list as a motivator for me – it isn’t what keeps me getting up in the morning or what leaves me feeling fulfilled when I come home at night. Doing something I love and am passionate about is what sustains me. Working for and with people with whom there is mutual respect inspires me. When you come home at night and your significant other says, “So honey, how was your day?” – I aim to be able to say, Great!
Great customer service is the key to happy customers.
Anyone and everyone who interacts with customers has the opportunity to impact them and therefore make them happy. Each conversation is a chance to improve the relationships that keep the business alive, whether it is at a conference, on the phone or in the grocery store line. Therefore, we should focus on these opportunities and create a culture in our respective businesses, where talented, dedicated, customer service-oriented and otherwise happy employees are the face of the company. These people ultimately represent what the company is all about; they most often determine the happiness of customers as well.
The next book is called “Tribal Leadership – Leveraging natural groups to build a thriving organization” – I’ll let you know how it goes!
–Amy Phillips
Tags: Books, business, customer service, customers, employees, happiness, happy, marketing
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