And now an example of WOW customer service

Posted on | March 8, 2009 | 1 Comment

If you’ve ever shopped for shoes online you’ve probably heard of Zappos.  Much  like the Smithsonian, you could never hope to look at every item in a single lifetime, you just hope you didn’t miss too much.  They literally have every shoe known to mankind and some I didn’t think were even  shoes.  They started back in 1999, the Jurassic period of the Internet, and they’ve thrived.  Surviving the dotcom meltdown and the current doteverything meltdown.  Why?  They deliver the most incredible customer service on the planet. PERIOD.

I’ll give you an anecdotal experience because we all know correlation implies causation.  I work for a major engineering, procurement and construction company who does huge projects for massive clients.  The kind of thing where we moved Air Force bases, widened some of the worlds largest canals, and built entire cities in the desert.  Well as a software engineer you don’t get to travel to many cool places but I did get a chance to go to the Bingham Canyon mine in Utah.  It was, at one point, the largest open pit mine on the planet.  Trucks the size of my house and a place where safety was the number one priority.   I was going to spend my time in the concentrator which was basically a massive building full of the coolest big stuff you could image.  Well there were two requirements; long-sleeved cotton shirts and steel-toe boots.  Shirts check, but boots?  I’m a computer geek in suburbia, I don’t own steel-toe boots.  The project would pay for them so next stop, zappos.com!

I went online because it’s the only place I can find my size and I had a week anyway, who needs to go to the mall.  I bring up the site, drill down to what I need and find a decent looking pair of black Doc Martens with a sweet steel toe.  Around $120 they weren’t cheap but it’s worth it for my toes.  I order them in a size 14 and sit back and revel in my awesomeness.  Then I get the confirmation email saying that I’d picked standard shipping not slightly expedited!  I was a little worried, this was Monday and I needed them for a trip the following Monday.  It might make it, it might not.  The client was all ready for me, no time to reschedule.  So I called Zappos.

When you call Zappos you get a human.  Not a comptuer saying enter your order ID, blood type, SSN, oh to slow call back.  A real live American in Nevada I believe.  Alright, that’s one point for Zappos.  After I get the customer service rep on the phone I explain to him that I screwed up and I needed to try and upgrade to expedited shipping.  Before I could get my card out to pay for it he’d upgraded me to overnight shipping at no cost.  Now a lot of online stores you can’t even cancel an order right after you click purchase let alone change or upgrade it.  I kid you not, for not a single cent extra, he upgraded me to overnight shipping I had them on my desk at work Tuesday.  Zappos, you have a customer for life, no questions asked.

What happened was the customer service agent was empowered to make me happy and did so even though Zappos was in no way wrong.  They didn’t have to do this, I would have chalked it up to me screwing up.  They could have charged me another $30 to ship them (rememeber, size 14 steel toes are exceedingly heavy).  I would have paid in a heart beat.  No, he upgraded me at no extra charge and did so happily.  And as a result, something like 75% of their customers are repeat customers.  It costs a small fortune to obtain customers but it can be amazingly easy to lost them or as Zappos has shown, blindingly easy to keep them.

Now I can’t promise we’ll be as good at Crowd Rent, but I assure you we will try.  We want to put the service back in customer service like Zappos did.  If you get a chance, give them a chance, I assure you they will not let you down.  Also, give us a shot, we’re new but we’ll go out of our way to not let you down.

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