The Zecco Inside Scoop

Watch Out Starbucks, Zecco’s In Town

This past week our executive team unchained themselves from their desks and hunkered down to spend some serious time talking about our most important asset here at Zecco: You.

I came into this meeting totally fired up after having just read The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary Into Extraordinary.


The story is brilliant. In fact, I just bought copies for the whole office. It talks about the singular experience the Starbucks customer gets every time he ducks in to grab a double espresso. The employees make it their business to wow the customer. They know their customers by name and make it a point to remember their favorite orders. They each own their part of the shop and make sure the foam on your latte is frothy and perfect. They even smile when you order your “Venti 3 pump vanilla, 2 pump caramel, non-fat, no foam, extra hot, upside-down, stirred, extra extra caramel drizzle, caramel macchiato.” That’s what we aspire to. We want every single member of the Zecco team to do something outstanding to make your experience with us remarkable.


I was further inspired by the story of Johnny, the bagger, an employee at a supermarket who heard his manager’s call to action that every employee do his or her part to move the customer experience above and beyond. Johnny, who at first believed he could do nothing as he was only a bagger, soon came up with a brilliant idea. He started placing an inspiring “Thought of the Day” into his grocery bags. In no time, people were cuing up in Johnny’s line. They were willing to wait longer to check out just so they could experience Johnny’s special touch. Watch it if you have a moment; it’s truly moving.

Coming out of our meeting every one of us was jazzed to get moving in this direction and do whatever it takes to create the ultimate customer experience. Our vision is to build a Zecco experience that amazes you. We want to totally blow your socks off with our trading tools, our community, our customer service and transformational website experience. We know we’re not there yet. But we’re working our tails off to get there.

As Lao Tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.” One recent step that majorly improved our customer experience was the launch of our new ACH transfer system recently. Our customers repeatedly asked that we make it easier to move money to and from Zecco Trading. You asked for it, we delivered it, and you’re loving it. Now you can easily transfer cash into your Zecco account electronically. This was recently posted on the Zecco community forums:

“I think that Zecco's new redesigned electronic money movement system is a HUGE improvement. Besides making it much easier to transfer funds between accounts, I can now view an extremely detailed and non-confusing account of all past Cash History transactions (including dividends and accrued money market
interest).” (see full thread here)

And we want to keep that dialogue open with you, our customer. Give us your feedback and we’ll keep improving so that some day soon Howard Shultz, the CEO of Starbucks will be blogging about how he aspires to offer a customer experience that rivals Zecco’s!

Sincerely,

Jeroen Veth
CEO
Zecco Holdings, Inc.

Published Wednesday, April 23, 2008 9:00 AM by Jeroen Veth - CEO
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Comments

 

StockChick said:

Thanks for the insight! A great customer experience and customer service go a long way with me. Looking forward to seeing what you guys got! And love the Quick Transfer feature, btw.
April 23, 2008 6:49 PM
 

tnor64 said:

While this may be "beating a dead horse", and may not even be profitable for Zecco to do, it would be really great if we were able to move back to the 40 free trades monthly.

I am finding that I am not able to adequately diversify my entire portfolio and that I am constantly coming up against the 10 trade limit every month. Even a compromise to 20 would help enormously.

Last fall, when we went from 40 to 10 free trades, and many new features were being implemented that were all pay services, I mentioned that the "viral" nature of your strategy and the word of mouth publicity it was getting were quickly deserting Zecco. I am sure that there are more members now than there were then, so you could probably say I was wrong, in a sense. More accurately, I'd say Zecco has improved a bit from that low point, and that the nature of free trades will draw in customers no matter how poorly they are treated. Be that as it may, I am certainly interested in seeing where this experiment goes ... but for the time being I would agree with you in that you are "not there yet." I give you all the credit in the world though for trying to make this business model work.
April 24, 2008 11:16 AM
 

Bleuwhale said:

Dear Jeroen Veth

I think, for Zecco to provide me a "above the wow" service, I would appreciate if you can have a STABLE AND OPERATABLE platform.

I have recently established my acc with Zecco and within 1 day, your entire website was down on a trading day for "regular maint."  Days later, a great number of us had been logged out of our accs from 7pm-9am+ (EST).

So, before you do a Venti 3 pump vanilla, 2 pump caramel, non-fat, no foam, extra hot, upside-down"... please jsut make good, simple coffee.

Thank you
April 24, 2008 12:12 PM
 

Jeroen Veth - CEO said:

@tnor64 I’m glad you’ve noticed improvements – we really are working hard to make Zecco the best place for investors. Thanks for the support!

@bleuwhale That is exactly where we’re focusing right now – we need to make sure that we’re delivering exactly what you need, especially when it comes to the performance and stability of the Zecco Trading platform.
April 24, 2008 8:14 PM
 

Ramjet777 said:

As far as the last time the system was down, about 1/2 a day, I would recommend that you post a link on your maintnence page so we could still trade. The problem was a web page on the community side that went bonkers and it took down the trading pages also. If this was down then community type changes could be done during the day and trading side maintenance could be scheduled after trading hours.

I would also like to see some cool AJAX updating of the portfolio values and posistions in realtime. AJAX is a way of updating a value on a webpage without having to do a refresh to get updated data. (See ADVFN.com for an example).

Keep up the great work!

Roger Hunt
April 25, 2008 5:05 PM
 

Jeroen Veth - CEO said:

Thanks everyone for taking the time to let us know what you think.  Your feedback is always valuable and helps us improve the Zecco experience.  As a true thank-you, I’ll be sending each of you a copy of this book, The Starbucks Experience.
April 30, 2008 7:38 PM
 

tnor64 said:

Received the book today. Thank you!
May 5, 2008 3:29 PM
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The above content is provided for educational and informational purposes only, does not constitute a recommendation to enter in any securities transactions or to engage in any of the investment strategies presented in such content, and does not represent the opinions of Zecco or its employees.


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The Zecco Inside Scoop
The Zecco Inside Scoop is a regular chat with Jeroen Veth, CEO of Zecco Holdings, Inc. You’ll get his first-hand account of what we’re doing at Zecco to give you the ultimate investing experience. So grab a cup of coffee and join Jeroen every week for his take on all things Zecco.
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