Erin Bury was working as a community manager at a tech startup in 2009 when she first came across Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness.
Customer support was a key part of Ms. Bury’s role. She was inspired to read that the now-deceased former CEO of the online shoe store Zappos subscribed to an ethos of autonomy for lower-level staff.
“At the time, I was that junior employee,” Ms. Bury explains. “When I was given that autonomy and ability to make decisions, I found it very empowering. I wanted to do right and go above and beyond for our customers.”
A decade later, Ms. Bury started her own technology business: an online estate-planning service called Willful. She has taken Mr. Hseih’s ethos to heart with her team of customer-service representatives.
“If they’re a bit more junior in their career, they’re not necessarily on senior leadership teams pulling the strings, but they have that agency to treat customers how they see fit,” explains Ms. Bury, who is based in Prince Edward County, Ont., but whose staff all work remotely.
For example, Willful has a 30-day refund policy but it allows reps to use their discretion to grant refunds outside of that range – sometimes, up to years – without needing a manager’s approval. “It makes reps feel trusted and competent,” Ms. Bury explains. “It makes them feel like they’re more responsible for the metric of customer satisfaction and that they have the autonomy to influence that.”
Empowering customer-service representatives results in more than just happier employees, according to Mr. Hsieh and now Ms. Bury, who says Willful has a low attrition rate for its customer-service team: It leads to satisfied customers and better outcomes for the business overall.
This outcome is especially important as the U.K.-based Institute of Customer Service reports that customer satisfaction levels have been falling steadily since 2022. Their research shows that 31 per cent of customers would be willing to pay more for excellent service. They also found that higher customer satisfaction leads to greater profitability: companies with above-average customer satisfaction rates had 10 per cent higher earnings.
Willful CEO Erin Bury says empowering her staff, regardless of rank, has lowered attrition rates.Supplied, courtesy of Willful
When a prospective Willful client reaches out for support for complex situations that the platform can’t accommodate, customer-service representatives are instructed to help answer questions and point them in the right direction, such as finding links on government websites – even if they are not paying customers.
“Every positive interaction with us is an opportunity for someone to spread the word about us to their network,” Ms. Bury says.
Greater freedom for customer-service representatives was an anomaly when Mr. Hsieh first became CEO of Zappos in 2001. “Customer-service reps were always seen as folks who don’t deviate from the script,” Ms. Bury says. “It was very radical at the time, the idea of empowering more junior employees with autonomy.”
Timothy M. Laseter, a professor of practice in technology and operations management at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, visited Zappos in the late 2010s, spending time with the company’s customer loyalty team in its Las Vegas headquarters to learn more about its operations, eventually writing two case studies on the business.
He says another radical Zappos approach was encouraging representatives to stay on the line with customers as long as they needed to, in order to build customer loyalty. Famously, a Zappos rep’s longest call with a customer lasted more than 10 hours.
“Mostly call-centre metrics were focused on efficiency and getting people off the phone to manage the wait times,” Prof. Laseter explains. “Zappos was doing it completely differently. Most people saw call centres as call centres, not a loyalty enabler.”
Making the shift from a culture of scripts and supervisor authorizations can be difficult. “Most managers got where they were by following orders and doing what they were told,” Prof. Laseter says. “They assumed that as they moved up, other people needed to do what they were told. It’s just how they’re wired.”
Company executives that learn to let go of strict policies can see positive results. A.R. Elangovan, a professor of organizational behaviour at the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business, says he believes this ethos starts with the hiring process.
“You’re looking at recruiting people who demonstrate an ability to think creatively and have a problem-solving orientation,” Prof. Elangovan explains. “They’re not just following a set of scripts or codes but are able to, when a situation arises, come up with a solution and also judge if that solution is within the broad boundaries of what the context requires.”
Letting go is easier when you can trust the employees who are given autonomy. That’s why he points out that making the right hires is so important.
Prof. Elangovan says training new employees to operate more autonomously also requires a perspective shift. “The orientation should talk about the values of the organization. You’re trying to align the decision making that happens at the customer service level to the values, aspirations and goals of the entire organization.”
He adds this type of workplace evolution does not happen overnight.
“The culture of the organization has to change since embracing this way of thinking, feeling, functioning and behaving needs to line up. Everything starts from the top. This would need to be a conscious decision by the leadership of the organization.”