How To Create Epic Stories: Zappos, Lexus and The Ritz

Want to have awesome stories circulating all over the internet about your company?

As the recent case of the Union Street Guest House shows, examples of terrible customer service, or excellent customer service go viral in the blink of an eye. Interactions between customers and employees are opportunities to create positive stories, negative stories, or epic stories. The potential of a story going viral is like a magnifying glass searching over every interaction, ready, at a moment's notice, to magnify excellence, mediocrity or failure.

So how do companies ensure that positive stories get spread?

They focus on creating a culture of exceptional service. Not just the publicly proclaimed company culture, that is put on posters and hung on the wall, but the actual culture. The way employees treat customers, each other and people in general. Smart companies understand that…

"Every customer is a reporter and every employee is now a marketer." - Jay Baer

A Bird In The Hand…

What the citizens of social media love to share is not companies that go out of their way to acquire new customers, but companies that go out of their way to delight existing customers, and prospects.

Marketers traditionally focused on customer acquisition.What matters now, more than ever, is customer retention.

So what's necessary for exceptional customer retention?

The first requirement is to have a great product that does what you say it will do. If a customer tries a new service which fails to live up to expectations, they will not be long term customers. An exceptional product is a great start.
Just focusing on telling prospects about your product shows up as high pressure and salesy though. No one wants to be told how awesome a product is100 times, or how much they need it. That gets old fast. As the old platitude goes, "No-one cares how much you know, before they know how much you care."

The same is true for social media. Companies often err by approaching social media like a corporation, instead of a person. They advertise, and try to close on the first move. Companies with epic culture try to help, before trying to sell. They understand that if you're helpful enough, the people you've helped will do the selling for you.

One of the best ways to help people is to give them something, a free sample, a free consultation or, best of all, a good story.

Shoes, Cars and Vacations

I love exceptional customer service stories, they really restore my faith in humanity and show me how delightful it can be to do business whether as a customer or a provider.

These three brands have done a wonderful job of establishing themselves as brands that go above and beyond to keep customers happy:


Zappos - Imagine ordering shoes online from what seems to be just another retail website. The checkout page says your shoes will arrive in 3-5 days. The next morning, you wake up, make some coffee and go outside to get the newspaper. Sitting beside the newspaper a box from that website. Inside are your shoes. What a delightful surprise! Creating moments of delight, just like that, is what established a billion dollar empire for Zappos.

They do a lot more to ensure that their existing customers are as happy as possible. Employees are encouraged to spend as long as is necessary on the phone with customers. In fact, the longest phone call in Zappos records is over 8 hours.

Those are just two indicators of how much the Zappos crew embodies their motto "Powered By Service."
If you Google Zappos Customer Service Stories and you'll find plenty of examples. The cool thing is they do this not just customers, but potential customers also. Since their target market is anyone who wears clothes, includes pretty much everyone. Zappos understands the power of any positive story, from paying tolls on turnpikes, to releasing high-priced toilet plungers to respond to Kanye, Zappos goes to "insane" and "fanatical" lengths to create epic stories that people remember.

Lexus - Lexus established itself as a brand committed to customer service just three months after it launched its debut car in September of 1989. The luxury automobile industry was laughing at Toyota. Mercedes and BMW waited for the Japanese Company to run, tail between their, back to the economy market and leave the luxury cars to the Europeans. Toyota approached the market with service in mind. They were focused on making the perfect luxury car for far less than their German rivals. This focus on customer satisfaction led to exceptional sales in the first few months after launch.
Then disaster struck. In December Lexus had received two customer complaints over defective wiring and an overheated brake light. This was not a massive issue, but just the type of stumble that could massively slow their entry into the luxury market. Lexus responded perfectly. Over the next 20 days Lexus replaced the defective parts on all 8,000 cars sold so far. Lexus sent technicians to the owners homes to pick the cars up, repair them and return them, washed and detailed, with a full tank of gas. This response to a potentially devastating problem established Lexus as a brand committed to high quality customer service. The story still lives on to this day as a wonderful example of how to impress customers.


Ritz Carlton- The Ritz Carlton is the paramount example of exceptional service. Each employee can spend up to $2,000, without approval, to fix any problem, or delight any customer.Giving any employee the power to spend up to $2,000 to fix a problem will ensure customers are satisfied. Extending that power to also delight guests will ensure that guests are not just satisfied, but ecstatic.

From giving an extra long vacation to a stuffed giraffe named Joshie, to just remembering guest's names and preferences, the Ritz Carlton employees take the great responsibility that comes with their great power seriously. The Ritz understands that stories will spread, and warm people's hearts. So they empower their employees to express company values and set high expectations for customers.

It works incredibly well, just read this this story:

"In Dubai a waiter overheard a gentleman musing with his wife, who was in a wheelchair, that it was a shame he couldn’t get her down to the beach. The waiter told maintenance, who passed word, and the next afternoon there was a wooden walkway down the beach to a tent that was set up for them to have dinner in. That’s not out of the ordinary, and the general manager didn’t know about it until it was built." (Source)

Isn't that a heart warming story? That's the type of story you would love to share.

Focus On The Micro Level

Lexus, Zappos, and the Ritz Carlton all give exceptional stories for their customers to share. People love having an epic story to tell. People also love hearing stories. Stories are the currency of social interaction and trust is the interest gained from making continuous investments in creating valuable stories to share.

If there are tons of stories about how a brand goes above and beyond for exceptional customer service, then people will trust that brand to deliver exceptional service in the future. All customers are marketers, and marketers are story tellers. So the best way to improve your marketing is to give better content for your marketers (customers) to share.

So why do some companies create such exceptional stories consistently, while others don't?

They focus on the micro level.

Specifically, how much each employee internalizes company culture.

• Zappos requires every new employee to work in the call center for 4 weeks, answering customer's calls, with no scripts. They get to know their customers, and genuinely desire to serve them.
• The Ritz creates a social incentive by holding 15 minute lineups daily where employees share WOW stories of how they impressed guests.
• Lexus employees are instructed to, "treat each customer as we would a guest in our home".

It Starts WIth The Leadership

Employees take their cues from their leaders. If leaders don't embody company values, neither will employees.
What's clear with these exceptional companies is that the upper management actually believes in this type of extraordinary customer service. Lower level employees follow their leadership and have the power to use their own judgment.
So many brands claim to believe all these things, but don't empower their employees. Instead they hide behind call centers and support tickets. When employees don't even have the power to fix problems, they probably don't have the power to go above and beyond either.

That's the key, giving employees ownership and trust.

So the formula for viral, positive PR starts with leadership. Then employees who internalize company values and have the power to express them. They then use that power to create stories of exceptional service, that people love to share. Then those small stories get picked up and recycled for years to come. Over time, people just expect that level of superior service.

People are going to tell stories about you. Be like Bill Murray and give them some good ones.

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