Linked by Matt on November 6 2008:
Making Sure the Shoe Fits at Zappos.com
What happens when you treat every customer as if they might be a reporter? Occasionally, one of them is a reporter: “Last spring, I called Zappos.com about a pair of shoes I wanted to buy for my upcoming wedding that they did not have in my size. The representative said Zappos.com would e-mail me when the right-sized shoes arrived back in stock. But she didn’t stop there. While I was on the phone, she searched for the shoes on the Web sites of Piperlime and Endless, two of Zappos.com’s major competitors. When she didn’t find them there in my size, she gave me the customer service phone numbers for those sites so I could call them, in case they got the shoes in stock first.”
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10 comments so far
Julien 06 Nov 08
Zappos is by very very far the best company on the customer satisfaction/service scale.
Marko Lokas 06 Nov 08
In a world of easy and low cost communication, if you care about good word of mouth, then every customer IS a reporter. Zappos obviously knows this very well…
Jonathan Dance 06 Nov 08
Case in point, this is how all companies should treat their customers. I’m in the midst of trying to wrestle my money back on a return from an unscrupulous vendor. In addition to souring the experience, it’s been a considerable waste of both my time and their customer service department’s time. By now, I’m sure they would have lost less money on the return if they had just credited me in full, and they wouldn’t have lost a customer in the process.
Benjy 06 Nov 08
Yet again, proving that Zappos is the gold standard for customer service when it comes to eCommerce. And that it wouldn’t be that hard for other companies to emulate if they just had the will to do so.
Jemaleddin 06 Nov 08
Somebody had a story up a while back about how his mother or grandmother passed away shortly after ordering her some special shoes (orthopedic?) from Zappos, and then he didn’t send them back within whatever their time limit is because he was busy dealing with funeral arrangements. He called Zappos, they took back the shoes and sent him flowers with their condolences.
I love buying shoes from them.
LKM 07 Nov 08
Similar story: In the early days, Yahoo had links to all other major search engines at the bottom of each search result page. Clicking on those links would perform the same search on these other sites. While this looks like a strange idea, it effectively ensured that people would try yahoo first on each search, since getting to other sites was so simple.
Mingo 07 Nov 08
This is the virtual opposite of 37signals’s service. Why exactly are you posting this?
ratchetcat 07 Nov 08
Zappos is a great company.
Matt 07 Nov 08
I love ‘em too. It’s a shame that they just announced layoffs.
JF 08 Nov 08
Mingo, we take customer service very seriously and try to provide the best, most accurate, fastest responses we can. Our customers like our service, but of course we can always do a better job.
Comments are closed