 I, uh, yeah, so it was a week ago, um, I think I was walking around Washington, D.C. with my wife looking for a new apartment, and I got this direct message from Alan saying, oh no, we don't have a keynote speaker anymore, and I said it's okay, I'll do it, I'll just have Rich make my slides for me, um, which is what I did, so if I don't know, if I don't seem to be talking about what you see behind me, it's because Rich made the slides, and we basically did it all this morning. Um, I made the mistake of asking Amy what she would have spoken about, and then thought I will do something like that. Instead of just choosing one of the many slide decks that I've done, and really it was just because I felt bad presenting the same thing to Anthony Eden yet again, because he has seen me do the same presentation so many times, and I think he actually asked me on IM, you're not going to do that McDonald's thing again, are you? So, uh, I will have McDonald's present here just for him, but it won't be the same thing that I usually do. So this is my team, or at least part of it. Um, I asked Amy what she was going to do, and she said, I was going to talk about the business of programming, and the fact that programmers don't understand business, and they don't think they need to, and they think it's not an art, and that's stupid, and they're lazy, and you're all a bunch of idiots, so I thought I can go with that. Um, but really, I took that idea, and I said, okay, what is it in business that programmers don't understand? Because she gave me a long list of things, um, you know, like, they don't understand sales, and they assume it's easy, then they try to do a product, and they can't sell it, for example. They've never read a book about sales. Um, we're, we're in a kind of unique situation, a very unique situation, I have to say. This is my, uh, consultancy that, uh, Rich Kilmer started many, many years ago, ten years ago, and I've had the pleasure of working with for, uh, several years myself. I was CTO of Infoeather, and we were recently purchased by Living Social. Um, so we're a consultancy that has just been acquired by a product company, which is really interesting. Um, and by interesting, I mean awesome. I said awesome because I'm American, and I think there's some sort of running tally of, of mentions of the word awesome at this conference. So why, people keep asking us, why did Living Social acquire you? That seems strange. What Living Social does is, uh, local commerce. Specifically, we've, we've come out and we've done the, the daily deal thing, so you can sign up for a deal in your city and you can get it for a great price. We're enabling merchants that are local, like mom and pop shops, to have kind of internet scale. So we're doing something that I think is really exciting. And at the backbone of that, really technology is our differentiator. The picture that you saw on the first slide that I had of Infoeather is by far the best team I've ever had a chance of, I've ever had the opportunity to work with. Now, with the combined team, we've actually doubled their engineering team size. It is that times a hundred. It's an amazing team, and they understand that. Living Social understands that they were created by four founders, three of whom are Rails programmers and Ruby programmers. So it's an amazing place to work. Technology is our differentiator, and they just got one of the best Rails and Ruby teams on the planet to help make that happen. But there's another huge differentiator, and it's the thing that I'm most excited about in making this transition. Not because I wasn't excited about it before, but because this has given me a chance to focus on, in my new role as VP of engineering, how do I want to run the engineering organization in Living Social? What do I want to focus on? And not just the Living Social engineering organization, but how do I want us to work with our customers and our customers' customers and really shape the future of the company? And I think the other massive differentiator that we have at Living Social, the kind of secret sauce, is carrying like crazy. Now, I got this phrase from Gary Vaynerchuk, who just released this book, The Thank You Economy, which I was lucky enough to be able to read a little bit early, otherwise I'd still be reading it because I'm the world's slowest reader. And Gary says this phrase, carrying like crazy over and over and over again. He talks about basically just loving your customers. If any of you know Gary Vaynerchuk, you know that he seriously means loving your customers. He's an intense guy, but he's an intensely positive guy. I feel that Living Social as a company, part of what made me excited to join it is that Living Social doesn't do anything unless it benefits the merchant, the customers of the merchant, and Living Social. That's kind of the mantra. So if it benefits the merchant, you know, we have to care about the merchant. We're trying to bring up all of these local small players and turn this into something big that they can do and help people make their businesses. It turns out, though, that that's how I've made my career. And I've got a pretty good career in software development. I've kind of, you know, it's worked out pretty well. Friends and I joke that it actually took off after I wrote a book about how to do it, which is funny. So my next book is The Passionate Millionaire. So the other thing that everyone else is mentioning in this conference is Corey Haynes. Here's a tweet that Corey did recently, contemplating what practices could constitute a list of required practices of modern software development. So you're probably all thinking, like, unit testing, right? And source control, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Justin Gaitland says, giving a shit. Actually, really giving a shit. Knowing the first thing about coding and then giving a shit. And I thought, that is pretty deep. All of this really means service. So service is what this presentation is about. It's the thing that I think programmers don't understand or that understand the least about the business they're in. Who here is in the service industry? Actually, you're all in the service industry. So everyone who didn't raise your hand, you're wrong. Everyone who was sitting next to them, give them a funny look. So actually, everybody's in the service industry. Everybody who does anything for anybody else. You might think you make software. You might think that you sell burgers at McDonald's. But really, we all make the same thing. We all make one thing and it's experiences for the people that we interact with. It's our customers. We make customer experiences. Here's an example. I've got tons of them, but this is one that may be surprising in the fact that I even remember it. So in September 2005, I was on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., and I had to go all the way to Dulles, which is a hellacious, horrible cab ride. Unfortunately, you can't get there on the metro. It's just get in a cab and sit in the back and, of course, text on your phone until you get the car sick and almost vomit. So one of those ugly purple cabs comes up and I think, well, that will make the experience special. And I get in and you're not allowed to smoke in the cabs, but it smells like smoke. And there is this old, fussy, grumpy-looking Ethiopian cab driver. And I get in the cab and I'm always kind of talkative to the cab drivers, especially the ones that seem to be from Africa, because they know where all the good restaurants are. So we're talking a little bit and then George Bush decides to leave the White House and everything gets crazy. And Pennsylvania we're heading toward the White House. The traffic stops and the guy standing there, or he's sitting there in traffic and he sits there for maybe 15 seconds and says, I hate traffic! And rather than, rather than that scared, I said, wow, you must not like your job very much. And he said, no, no, actually, and he turned around. He was already moving at this point. He turned around and he said, no, no, no, I love my job. I hate traffic. My job is to fight the traffic. And I thought, wow, what an amazing piece of career advice. But not just that, I had a beautiful time in this hour-long car ride. I didn't even get car sick. And here it is, almost six years later I'm telling a group of people in another country about this guy. So most cab drivers think that their job is to take you from one place to the next. But I've probably met 50 or 60 that have changed my life in some way, some small way sometimes, some major way sometimes. So in preparing for this talk, and I did a lot of preparation, at least you know that I was considering doing this talk on March 28th. This is how I do presentations now. This is how I get content. I just asked Twitter and then you guys make the content for me. So I said, what was the best customer service experience you've ever had? And I got all kinds of good answers. There were some that were touching. There were some that's like there's one up there that says that the guy actually smashed his answering machine with his fist because his girlfriend broke up with him or his ex-girlfriend called and the company gave him a new one because of the situation. And really he didn't deserve it at all. So there were a lot of little stories like that where companies did extra things that were just not necessary, not expected. And I started pulling all this stuff together and you know like categorizing it and I ran it through all sort of statistical analysis and I had Jeremy Heinegarder make a Hadoop cluster for me. And then I couldn't get any of that to work so I just made this list. And this is what we're going to talk about. So I show you this list so that you'll know we're almost done because I know you're all anxious to eat. So when you see gratitude, guess what it's almost over. Seven values that I think you can use for doing service right, for getting it right. The first one is curiosity. Didn't Rich do a good job with these slides? Thank you Rich. Alright so you should be curious about who your customer is. I said that I was VP of Engineering for Living Social so who might my customer be? Well the first answer that I have is it's my team because someone has to step in and give a shit about each individual member of the team. Someone has to love the team members and love the team and help the people on the team get to where they want to be in life. Because it's my philosophy, philosophy, it's my philosophy that if a company is not providing actual growth and I don't mean growth opportunities, I mean actual growth for its employees then the company is not a sane place to be. The employees should actually leave. So if you're in a place that's not doing that you should leave. Okay so my team, the product development organization. So there are people who are deciding what's going to get built and working with us to get it done. We're implementing it. The founders, I report to one of the founders but all the founders are kind of the heads of the company. So those are certainly my customers, the investors in the company, the consumers of our product, the consumers of our service. Those are my customers and I do think about that. You know we're in engineering and you could think like oh I'm just building software or whatever but technology drives our business so the consumers are my customer and so are the merchants that are running these deals with us and trying to build their businesses and trying to benefit from us. So if they're not getting a benefit from it and I notice that they aren't it's my job to make sure that they do. And the merchants, customers. So you know it could be a salon or it could be a restaurant or a bookstore. The people who are coming in and actually doing business there should actually have a good experience. Those are my customers as well. Local business communities. So we're driving local commerce, that's our thing. We want to allow all of these local small business communities to grow and compete with the massive you know walmarts of the world etc. And then I'm not joking here. Part of my job, I see it, is to serve the economy. We can make a change here. We as in us programmers, we can certainly screw up the economy, I can tell you that. But we can make it better and my company can make it better and therefore I can make it better. So these are my customers. And the way I think of this now is I've just listed all of these and some of them I don't touch directly. But it's kind of like we have this chain of service. You know you have your customers and your customers customers and your customers customers customers etc. And you can set off this chain of positive or negative service events. If you do something really great for someone at one point in time maybe you just give them what they need is you know like before they need it. It can set off a chain of positive things happening and customers being happy and therefore people being happy as they're trying to get things done. You can model this using something called rolled throughput yield. So Anthony here's the six sigma part of my presentation. I've got McDonald's, I've got six sigma. I don't think I'm going to talk about offshore outsourcing, but I'll find a way. So rolled throughput yield basically is defined as the total yield of a set of processes that are dependent on each other in a chain. It's used in manufacturing but you know it's like you have process one throughput yield, process two throughput yield. The whole idea is you start it off being able to make a certain number of pieces and in the end you get a certain number of pieces that are actually working. That's rolled throughput yield. Same thing applies in service. If I screw up for my customer let's say I screw up for a merchant they're probably going to screw up for their customers and that's going to create a negative service experience and maybe it's the customer is trying to go eat lunch so then they can't get back and do their jobs so they're going to screw up for their customer and so on and so on and so on. It's like a domino effect. So understanding your customers and being curious about them once you sort of know who they are then you need to think about what it's like to be them. You know understand their perspective. I had a positive example of this recently as I said in fact I think it was the exact same day that Alan direct messaged me about coming out here and it was we had been going from apartment building to apartment building to apartment building in Washington DC and there seems to be a thing there where if you're going to tour the apartment building you have to present a photo ID and then they actually put it in an office where you can't get to it and then they take you on the tour and then you have to remember to go get it and you kind of feel like you're checking into a prison or something it's really strange and you know we're touring some pretty nice apartment buildings and here we are being toured around like we're criminals. The last one and the one we actually end up going with you know I'm like I know the drill so I pull up my wallet and I'm holding my my ID in my hand and the guy comes out and meets us and he says okay you want to tour and I said yeah he says okay I see you're holding your ID you can go ahead and put it in your pocket I trust that because of the fact that you took it out that's good enough for me so we're not going to go store it in some stupid office and treat treat you like a criminal. We walked around he complimented my clothes I have to say that was an important part. He remembered you know he asked a lot of questions about us he understood what we wanted we have dogs you know he knew that we actually wanted to move to New Orleans and we ended up not moving there yet because we're going to DC all the sort of stuff he understood what kind of atmosphere we were looking at looking for an apartment you know it's a place where you have a doorman all this stuff the perspective of a customer coming into a place where there's a doorman and you have to you know you have key card entry and all that sort of stuff that sort of customer doesn't want to present an ID and being shuffled around like a criminal and this guy got it in fact when I called him the next day on the phone he made sure to mention things about New Orleans and you know all the other stuff we talked about so it was the right kind of experience he understood us the other thing that I've noticed recently is that as and again really all the stuff on the slides has happened in the last week it's funny so you need to present a simple understandable interface to your customers whoever they are as a development organization it's pretty clear that the way to do that is to shield them in a positive way from the technical details of what you do you know you don't want to talk to a non-technical person about oh I have to branch and fork and get or something you know they don't know what that is and it sounds like you're insulting them but even if it didn't sound like they were insulting and it would make them feel stupid because they didn't get it and your job in whatever it happens to be is never ever to let your customers feel stupid because they don't know how to interact with you so a bad example of this is United Airlines and continental airlines have merged so that means they're one airline right yeah every time I get on a united flight there's some stupid video that plays that says we're one great airline etc etc we booked the flights here on united and they were continental flights and every time I call I say this is this is just one airline right so I'm calling United that's where I have a customer support thing and every time the people on the phone are angry with me like no there's two airlines you have to call continental for that but it's like some things I have to call continental for some things I don't that the the interface is so complicated that I just can't get it at all and they treat me like an idiot whenever I whenever I try you know I think okay this time I'm going to call the right one I'm going to go to the right website it's impossible to do it boarding the flight here they say please have your passport and your boarding pass open on the face page so it's ready to present and get in so I am absolutely perfect you know I've got it exactly right I've got it just so that they can see it I hand it over and the lady takes my boarding pass and lets my passport drop to the floor and acts like I'm an idiot because I didn't get that I was just supposed to show her one and hand her the other one and she says no no you're supposed to hand me the the boarding pass and show me the passport and and then waited for me to pick it up so I could get out of the way so this was the part where I just vent over the travel experience here sorry but you know I said you don't want to scare your customers and in fact your customers are already scared everything that you guys do is scary well not everything but the work that you do is scary what you're doing right now scares me in fact your job is to be like an adventure tour guide so some people want to do things that might be scary or might even be risky or might even be dangerous we as programmers have a way to enable them to do it we know how to do things that they're afraid of you know they're barely okay most of them with just using the web we're making web applications we're doing weird stuff with react and redis and all these kinds of things so you know imagine you're going on a tour where you get to see lions up close and personal you probably won't do that by yourself unless you know something about how they work yeah and by how they work I mean how you interact with a lion so it doesn't eat you or so that it does depending on what your goal is so our jobs are to be like an adventure tour guide for our customers to take them into these scary places allow them to feel the thrill of you know whatever it happens to be that we're doing not to treat them like idiots and make them you know stay in like a rubberized room so they can't mess anything up but to allow them to get as close as they want to the edge and make it safe for them to do that so no I made this one rich would never have done this because of a color contrast I don't know what I've discovered is that programmers have bad taste and whenever I make slides none of them like the color scheme have you seen my Twitter profile page anyone so okay McDonald's is not a place you go for excellent service especially in Memphis Tennessee but it turns out that if it's 5 a.m. in a small town in New Zealand you might actually be surprised and Kelly and I went to New Zealand once and we took a little trip around and New Zealand from the US is just about the worst jet lag you can have so we kept waking up like 4 a.m. starving so we would just pack up and leave the hotel and get in the car and one morning we're just bleary-eyed and starving and we we can't find anything except for a drive-through McDonald's so we're like oh yeah McDonald's in a foreign country that's not okay usually but we're going to do it we pull up to the drive-through and it dings and the guy says good morning and we had maybe the most pleasant conversation I've ever had with someone in a foreign country in the 30 seconds that we ordered our food that was 11 12 years ago and it still you know made a difference today and I still think about that guy when I'm doing stuff like fixing a bug that is annoying me or dealing with you know performance issues or some icky part of my job that no one expects me to be excited about I'm not always perfect in fact I'm really perfect but I try to remember this if you provide excellent service where it's unexpected your expectations are so low that the service experience is exponentially greater so compassion is the third if I'm counting right value I wrote this book in 2005 this was my first book I had written a couple of chapters of other people's books this so I knew already that writing a book is a horrible thing to put yourself through and I'm serious it sucks probably several of you have started books and not finish them because statistically they don't get finished you start on you think wow this is like being in prison this is horrible until it's done then when it's done it's awesome so I knew already that what people want is not to write a book people want to have written a book and what I signed up to do this one Dave Thomas was the guy I was interacting with from the pragmatic bookshelf and he was an old friend of mine already he asked me to do the book and Dave's the kind of guy you just don't want to let him down you know so I started thinking really hard about should I sign up to do this should I commit to it I was one of the first few books that pragmatic bookshelf did so it was really kind of a big deal for me to drop out halfway through it if I if I was going to so what I decided as my guiding factor for writing any book because I really don't like writing is if I can help people if I really really care about the people that are going to be reading it all the way through and I really believe that I can help them then it's worth doing so you know this this idea of having compassion for your customers really to me made the whole job worth doing and I believe it actually came out in the book not not to brag it's actually not even bragging it's humbling but in the last week now I think I've gotten like three emails from different people randomly across the planet that say thank you for changing my life with the second edition of this book and really the things I say in the book are not rocket surgery I think what has come through is that caring so who can you help you always be thinking about who can I help in your job there are people that maybe you're not you're not directly necessarily being paid to help but but if you add them to your sphere things can be better for them and for you and maybe the answer is actually you can help everybody so instead of thinking about who you can help Derek Sivers and his how to call attention to your music e-book which is actually totally worth reading for all of you even if you're not musicians says always think how you can help someone and let that be how you start conversations with new people and he also says always meet at least three new people a week so that the way that you do it as you think I'm going to think of three new people or three new categories of people maybe in my work or outside of my work that I want to be able to help or I want to be able to meet and then I'm going to try and figure out what it is I can do that can help them this is a beautiful way to get to know people even outside of your job for career development let's say there's some programmer that's done something that you really admire or there's someone that works in a company that you would love to work for and you know you want a way to get to know them what think about how you could help them and and come at it that way a lot of the people that I've met in the industry that are now dear friends and colleagues are people that just emailed me and said you know like that that code you wrote a shit I'm gonna refactor it for you and help you you know that sort of thing I'm not that's not the way to do I'm joking but this is a good thing to do in fact the way that I met Dave Thomas which arguably is the most important career changing thing I ever did because he got me into teaching and writing and everything is I emailed him and I said I'd like to augment the Ruby documentation you have on your site with this DRB tutorial that I did and can I use the templates that you used and the styling because it you know had my style Dave and I are really good designers and that started the whole thing I just emailed him to offer something so always think how you can help someone speaking of Dave in the pragmatic programmer Dave and Andy have you know one of their little snippets I think they call up tips that says always answer every email that you get which kind of sounds stupid like is that really a bullet and one of the you know major headings in the pragmatic programmer the classic the computer programming classic and it is and the funny thing is that might be the only one I can remember having read it ten years ago I remember thinking it was weird though when I first read it but it's such great advice and when you're someone like Dave he didn't answer my email you know in fact I think that's why I emailed him because I knew he was going to answer it and you can take this further because email is antiquated technology you know always respond to every tweet if someone tweets at you last week sometime someone tweeted something to me and I responded with like one word and they said oh sir thank you for your kindness I'm not I'm not used to people replying to me they were so excited and I thought wow that's interesting I got this idea on the tweeting from Gary Vaynerchuk who has 900,000 Twitter followers or something and actually tries to respond every tweet he also responds to every email Gary at VaynerMedia.com but it's beautiful and it's endearing and I feel like Gary knows me and likes me when he probably has to look up who I am every time he sees my name that's fine but my experience in reading his books or watching his videos or you know anything involving him is better and I feel better about my relationship with him because he doesn't have to be like that he's generous so here's another value in my Twitter poll John DeGos who has just for a plug since he helped me has written a really awesome Scala framework called Blue Eyes so if anyone wants to do any web programming in Scala Blue Eyes he said Alexis dealership was his best experience which was not all that helpful so I said in what way and he said this the feeling that they do 10 minutes of work to save you one minute of your time that's really good that that is a great way to think about interacting with the people that you're trying to help just like let that burn into your brain for a minute even if you won't do 10 minutes of work to for one minute of your customers time letting them feel that way is not lying to them because if they walk away feeling that way you've done the right thing on the contrary as a counter example here's go daddy go daddy wants to waste 10 minutes of your time when it should really take one minute to do what you're trying to do I don't know if any of you use go daddy or if you use it here in the UK do you they have some customers yeah most of them are with DNS simple they're all they're all moving to DNS simple now and by all I mean you know hundreds of them but when you try to buy something through go down daddy you're already a customer you you log in you've been a customer for years like me you say I'm gonna add another domain and you have to walk through spam after spam after spam do you want this do you want that every single time I've always said no I just want the domain registration surely they have figured it out by now I don't want those things how many times do I have to say no thanks no thanks but they really they want me to make a mistake I think is that what it is they want me to say yes next or whatever it is they're treating me like you know I'm a prospective customer when I've already made the decision to buy something from them I might already even be you know a loyal customer I don't know how that's possible again last week in Washington DC we needed some stuff from the drug store and we went and it was CVS drug store and they I was delighted to see that they have automated checkouts because I really don't like interacting with people very much and they did and so we went to the automated check out took a long time because we actually had to involve like three employees to get the thing to work that's not a joke and then we finally do it and to add insult to injury hurrah we're clicking go pay and it says would you like a bag that would be five cents five cents really we just spent maybe thirty dollars do you really need five more cents and several seconds of my time and my frustration at you'd not just giving me a stupid bag so anyway I don't know why I'm yeah I've just I've had a bad week I guess so another one that you should complain about if if you're cuss if you're a your employer doesn't do this for you is employee benefits as a manager of a team again after many years I'm going back to the things I learned at this is going to sound strange but one of the greatest people management companies of the world g e that's gonna sound crazy because they also do six sigma but it's true that you don't just give the employees what they need to do their job you might do that if you're in an industry where you know the employees are just sweeping the floor and it's okay if they kind of mess that up and you're not paying very much you know whatever they're all wanting to do something else anyway usually but and a knowledge working kind of field intentionally go beyond what they need to get the job done maybe it's the computers you buy for them maybe it's you give them three monitors instead of two like normal people have you give them benefits that are better than they need etc so you don't know your customers businesses better than they do this is something that so I told you we were making our slides rich I were making the slides today and we were at the apartment luckily for you because otherwise you wouldn't have been able to hear the speaker so if you haven't seen this damn you auto auto correct calm I'm sorry but you're going to spend hours but you're also going to get a good ab workout from it from the laughing so the iPhone thinks it knows what you want better than you do for example I never want to talk about a fir tree when I'm typing a text message and those laughing have iPhones but the other thing is imagine imagine a company like ours that's dealing with merchants and all different types of industries imagine we were to go to our customers and say you know what we're doing this really well I know you've had this pizza shop for 40 years or this salon that's been doing great business you're trying to expand let me show you how to run that salon or let me show you how to run that pizza shop or product development people let me talk to you about how products should be developed or hey CEO let me talk to you about how your business should be run because I know better than you it drives me insane when companies do this or when programmers do it to their customers you you don't know about your customers businesses especially if you're consultant hopefully you strive to know about them hopefully you get better and better and better and if you're at a company where you're doing the same thing you're the same product or the same domain and you've been there for a while you better be one of the most knowledgeable people there but most of the time you aren't and you have to remember that because if it come off as being arrogant like you know better about the thing your customer is supposed to know than they do you know that thing I told you about fear they're just not going to want to interact with you at all if my if united tells me how I how I most comfortably want to fly I will switch to some other airline you know if McDonald's tells me you don't want to eat that that's going to make you sick I might actually eat there yeah I would actually eat there for that then be transparent about what it is you're actually selling what it is you're actually doing how you profit this one doesn't really apply so much to individual programmers but you know if if I buy something from you I expect the money that I give you to be the end of the transaction I don't expect you to be selling my name to a list for example I don't expect I don't expect you to be trying to upsell me like go daddy does it's all about just me understanding the transaction with you as a customer and so we can all kind of take a lesson from that now to bring all of this together if I sometimes give you a great experience and I sometimes give you a very poor experience what you're going to remember definitely is the poor experience there's a saying in statistics that says you can't cross a river using averages because if the average depth is okay to walk through that doesn't mean that there isn't a ten foot drop somewhere you know if there's a two foot section and the same thing is true here and in fact if you're inconsistent it's worse than being kind of consistently mediocre if you're sometimes great people will expect great and then you drop off a cliff and everyone's drowning I learned some important lessons from this from this book that I cite in every presentation I ever give which is the emith revisited what I always say about this is is that maybe the worst title of a book ever other than my job went to India and all I got was this lousy book it's not about e-commerce it's about entrepreneurial thinking and it's about how small businesses typically fail and it totally applies to people who aren't trying to run a business it applies to you as an employee of a company or consultant or someone trying to run a business whatever it happens to be that you're doing the central idea here is that consistency of service is maybe the most important thing you can do and to achieve consistency you automate things you systemize things you even document so you create a system that's documented that some person can do he goes so far as to talk about breaking down even your individual job role into an org chart and putting fake names on it and talking about who does what and what the responsibilities are just so that you can make sure every base is covered which is really great advice for providing consistent service an example of creating a system for this kind of thing is zappos.com do you have that here in the UK no so that's too bad Amazon has purchased them at this point but they're kind of still operating the way they always have zappos.com sells mostly shoes that's what I know them for we we have bought a lot of shoes from zappos.com and my wife tells me that every single time the shipping is upgraded by one level so if you say I want these shoes in three days then you'll get the next day delivery it's kind of fishy I don't know this for a fact but even if it's not true it's kind of a cool idea what if they just actually let you select a lower option and then they always give you the higher option and they pay for that because the shipping isn't more expensive than what you would expect but it's always upgraded every single time which means every time and they never tell you this is going to happen so they've made a system it seems out of surprising and delighting you that's pretty awesome at LivingSocial I was talking to one of our customer care people recently because I've been going around talking to all the different people from the company are kind of important people in different jobs and she was telling me that they were watching Twitter and they post silly stuff on the LivingSocial account sometimes like they had gotten this big thing of cupcakes in the office that's a big thing at LivingSocial and they took a picture of it and posted it and someone responded and said oh I would love to have some of those cupcakes so they actually packaged up the cupcake and found out the person's address and shipped it to them like next day I don't even think this was a customer it's just some random person all right have a cupcake sweetwater.com is another one that I hope that you can use here but you probably can't because the shipping would be expensive this is a site that sells musical equipment when you buy something from them let's say it's a guitar pick yeah a little guitar pick you will have a music like a technical sales engineer assigned to you to help you figure out how to use the guitar pick now you buy a let's say acoustic guitar or no probably a Les Paul right you wouldn't buy an acoustic guitar you buy a Les Paul the same exact person says hey Chad thanks for ordering with us again let me know if you need help with the Les Paul in fact I play guitar so you know I could talk to you about like what amp settings work well for me I can talk to you about how these pickups work on different pedals and it's like okay cool five years later order some sort of USB audio device to plug it into your computer same person emails you back and it's not that it's just like you know Mark from Living Social who's actually a bunch of people you know across the globe at a call center there's actually a guy named Mark that I say Living Social from Sweet Water we have a mark at Living Social easy mistake to make it's actually him you can call him you can talk to him he has the same voice every time so it's amazing and people who do music stuff they know about you know this this aspect music software and equipment is actually very hard to use and that's how they knew this would make sense whenever you start interfacing computers together especially and this is a high-end business because that that Gibson Les Paul there probably costs a lot of money you know it's probably a couple thousand dollars could be a little more or less but it's nice to have that kind of personalized focus stuff I mean they might even say are you sure you want this because last time you bought that they're not compatible so I think maybe you run a Mac from what you fought in the past and this is a Windows thing so are you sure or did you get a Windows computer that's pretty amazing they ever had a site do that for you I doubt it so you can you can create a system out of learning from your customers which is what I was just talking about you know what does the customer what computer do they probably use what kind of music do they seem to do can I make some decisions about how to help them more based on that what are the sorts of questions they're always asking is that my fault that I didn't already tell them the answer I didn't already guide them to the right place what sort of problems are they having with the the actual interactions with what I do do I keep making the same mistake over and over or does my team keep making the same mistake over and over such that it's not trackable you know I don't know that so-and-so already made this mistake last week and I'm doing it again so build in the systems whatever they might have to be sometimes they can be automated sometimes they can be checklists whatever but build systems so that you learn as you move and you're learning specifically about service and then the final point I told you when you saw gratitude we'll almost be done so can all wake up now take a deep breath gratitude customers provide your jobs always always always always because if you don't have any customers then you don't have any work to do you're not providing anything unless you're your own customer and that's kind of a weird thing then you don't really care because you've got enough money for that so you need to treat customers with a sort of reverence you know like there's something sacred about having a customer about having that relationship even if you think your customer is a putz you know you can't think that you can't and you should not think that because maybe in their personal lives they are maybe there's some aspect of them that you don't like but the fact that they are your customer and you have that connection you need to respect that connection and you need to be thankful for that connection so say thank you do it as often as you can without them thinking you're insane and do it in different ways sometimes do it by giving them a little extra or you know you work a little at night sometime because there's something you know that they want that you've not been able to provide them and you're not necessarily on the hook to provide them but just do it that's a way of saying thank you and then I think the most important piece of this caring like crazy goal that I have in my new job and therefore in my new life here is to kill cynicism wherever I can and if you think about it cynicism is actually not ever a good thing you know in your workplaces you might sit around joking about the stupid decisions that the business made you might talk about a crappy test suite or the bad code that some other guy made or you know the hideous marketing campaign that you think is gross that your company is rolling out whatever happens to be but rather than be cynical about that stuff why don't you just fix it cynicism is laziness and so an example of me being cynical I hate get I hate the get source control tool thank you very much Steven see I have plants I even know their names Steven Baker everyone I hate get I'm getting used to it and I'm tempted to always tweet stuff about get sucks and it's like maybe the worst user interface of any piece of software ever created and that kind of thing Chris one stroth on the other hand now he likes get probably he's one of the founders of github by this point he might not like it either I don't know but he likes the result there was a tweet because you know all I do is interact with people via Twitter there was a tweet I don't know it was like 2007 sometime struggling with getting get some get server thing working right very frustrated something like that so I'm sure I would have been really frustrated too because it was not hard it was not easy to set up it really kind of sucks but Chris instead of just acting like a jerk and writing a blog post get you know to get his frustration out started a company and completely changed his and a bunch of other people's lives so that's the difference that's the opposite of cynicism so here they are curiosity empathy compassion generosity humility consistency gratitude it's all common sense apologize for that hopefully the focus has helped you think about it in the light of what you do why does this matter because you can improve people's lives the taxi driver that I told you about from 2005 September on Pennsylvania Avenue improved my life I have retold that story many times now he didn't change my life in any massive way but clearly he did in enough of a way that I would bother to mention it here in front of a bunch of people I've now retold it to you and it may have had effect on on you right when you have these positive service experiences you will retell them it will change the way you feel it spreads and the way that this works is it's kind of like we have a sales team internally that it's like a commission sales team and the way life is as a sales person is you kind of have like your bread and butter sales that just go and go and go and kind of get the same numbers all the time and every once in a while you come up with a deal that's just awesome bam you get a huge payout but the thing that this pays is passion because passion for what you do is a renewable resource but you actually have to work to renew it I have made mistakes and not work to renew it and run out before and that caused me to be pretty sucky for about a year but now I've I've figured it out and I've done this kind of stuff has built me back up watching the Twitter stream from this conference and talking to people in person I know that many of these presentations have changed lives here just in these two days which is pretty amazing to think about I was just in Kiwi's career health check talk and I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of people that are going to walk away and have actionable stuff to do there they're thinking differently so you can change people's lives it is beneficial to you so thank you very much it has been a pleasure