A few months back I stumbled on the Zappos Twitter account and was amazed to see that Tony the CEO is the voice of the brand. He doesn’t simply tweet about Zappos, but he opens up his life to all 12,000 of his followers. A particular tweet brought to my attention was one about his frustrations with not having time to shower before catching a flight. Talk about things people can relate to – he’s actually a real person! As I dug around on the Twitter account I found the Zappos blog. The content of the blog is very personal and after reading a few employee postings it became clear that the employees are huge advocates for the company.

In addition to their ability to embrace social media, Zappos is also the model for great customer service. Shipping is always free and they frequently WOW me by upgrading my shipping just to say they appreciate my business. Oh, and when I tweet to thank them the CEO replies with “glad you had a good experience, thx for your support! ”

This stellar service is instilled in all Zappos employees and new hires are required to complete a four week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. After a week or so Zappos will approach its newest employees and say: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” They actually bribe their new employees to quit! Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for.

So is all this paying off?  Well, in July 2007 a customer contacted Zappos about returning a pair of shoes and, as standard process, they sent her a free UPS label – all she had to do is drop the shoes off at UPS. A few weeks passed and Zappos had not received the shoes so they sent her an email to follow up. She replied that her mom had recently passed away and she completely forgot, but she’d get to them when she could. They emailed back that they had arranged for UPS to pick them up so that she didn’t have to worry about it. She was amazed, but don’t think they stopped there. The next day she came home and there was a beautiful bouquet of flowers from none other than Zappos. She was touched and blogged about it. Her blog post, “I heart Zappos”, has been read over 350 million times!

At Zappos they don’t just want their customers to be satisfied they want them to be amazed. They truly are a customer service company that just so happens to sell shoes. My opinion of them has skyrocketed after learning about their core values and I wonder how many other people have been touched the same way….

*This post was inspired by “Customer Service is the New Marketing” from the Web 2.0 conference.