I just had a fantastic customer service experience with Zappos.

“Fantastic” and “customer service” in the same sentence?

I was just as surprised, but after I recovered from the pleasant shock, I called back to thank them. I also asked what Zappos does to train their customer service reps.

The rep I was talking with couldn’t stop telling me what a great a place to work it is.

Their training and employee development programs:

• 2 weeks of initial training
• Plus on-going training on-site (with various manufacturers reps)
• With an on-site coach for employees to make goals and work with them to meet them

For call reps, they offer a clear path to promotion:

• temp -> perm 3 mos, promotions based on performance
• level 1 -> 3 mos
• level 2 -> 3 mos
• level 3 -> 3 mos

The performance metrics they use to promote folks include:

• “Call” metrics, rather than phone metrics—was the proper process followed for what was being handled; did they include the right elements in their conversation with the customer?
• “Attendance & punctuality are big here,” she said
• Test score percentages (level 1 has to score at least 90%, it goes up from there)

Here are a couple of articles about their customer service philosophy:

At Zappos, customer-service employees don’t use scripts and aren’t pressed to keep calls short. Hsieh says customer loyalty is so important to the company culture that the call center and headquarters have to be in the same place—Las Vegas. Every new hire spends four weeks as a customer-service rep and a week in the Kentucky warehouse before starting work. from Business Week

Zappos’s three-week training course for call-center reps starts with telling employees to forget everything they’ve learned. That’s partly because Zappos, a six-year-old online shoe retailer with $184 million in 2004 gross sales, isn’t like many other companies. The training course’s required reading? A 156-page handbook on Zappos culture, written entirely by employees themselves. In it, they quote Jimi Hendrix, praise the company-paid lunches, and tell stories about how they’ve felt empowered to help customers. Chairman and founder Nick Swinmurn… calls Zappos “a service company that happens to sell shoes.” from Fast Company mag

According to business guru Tom Peters every company that wants to thrive now, big or small, needs to be, first, a customer service company.

From Harleys to iPods to Nyquil to the $46 billion value-added water market, we are miles and miles—and then more miles—beyond the “stuff” economy. source