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.”
Julien
on 06 Nov 08Zappos is by very very far the best company on the customer satisfaction/service scale.
Marko Lokas
on 06 Nov 08In 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
on 06 Nov 08Case 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
on 06 Nov 08Yet 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
on 06 Nov 08Somebody 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
on 07 Nov 08Similar 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
on 07 Nov 08This is the virtual opposite of 37signals’s service. Why exactly are you posting this?
ratchetcat
on 07 Nov 08Zappos is a great company.
Matt
on 07 Nov 08I love ‘em too. It’s a shame that they just announced layoffs.
JF
on 08 Nov 08Mingo, 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.
This discussion is closed.