I must have had my crystal ball turned on without noticing. I’m working on an article on Zappos for a new customer service magazine I’m editor of, and noticed that Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay)’s vision for his company is to become THE service company on the net – expanding from shoes to sell anything. That puts them firmly in Amazon’s territory, I wrote, as Amazon has the same strategy – broadening out from books to selling just about anything. I now have to re-write the piece to take into account the fact that Amazon has just bought Zappos. Smart move Jeff – buy the competition while you still can.
Amazon’s great service is based on ‘the best service is no service’ – eliminating stupid contacts with customers (most customer service department contact is because something didn’t work or went wrong) and anticipating how the customer thinks, buys, uses the site, to head off and avoid those kinds of contacts. They do it very well.
Zappos’ customer service is next-generation. It uses its contact centre to build loyalty. It WANTS customer contact, and even has its call centre number on every page whereas most web retailers, including Amazon, don’t want you calling them. Zappos puts the human back into customer service. Anyway, here’s Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explaining why he bought Zappos:
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