I was leafing through the pages of the latest Harvard Business Review the other day and caught a glimpse of an article by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos on going to extremes for customers. In case you haven’t heard, Zappos’ remarkable reputation for extreme customer service has been key in taking in from 1.6M in revenue in 2000 to 1.2B in 2009, yes, that’s Billion with a “B”. Oh, and by the way, it’s harder to get a job at Zappos than it is to be accepted into Harvard University!

How has Zappos accomplished this? Well, in the article, Tony shared his 7 Secrets of creating exceptional customer service in their call center:

1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company. It’s not just a department

2. Empower your customer service reps. Rarely should they have to escalate a customer’s issue to a supervisor.

3. Fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.

4. Don’t measure call times, don’t upsell, and don’t use scripts.

5. Don’t hide your phone number. you want to talk to customers.

6. View the cost of handling customer’s calls as an investment in marketing, not an expense.

7. Celebrate great service by telling exceptional stories to the entire company.

“There’s a lot of buzz these days about social media and ‘integration marketing.’ Our belief is that as unsexy and low-tech as it may sound, the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer’s undivided attention for five or 10 minutes, and if you get the interaction right, the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tells his or her friends about it.” ¹

¹ Tony Hsieh, “Zappos’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers,” Harvard Business Review (2010): 41.