The School of WOW!
Designed and refined after years of custom events and participant feedback, the newly launched School of WOW has two offerings: one for customer service leaders and one for frontline employees.
Led by Zappos customer service experts, both platforms review the key tools needed to set your customer service apart and really WOW your customers. Hosted at Zappos HQ in downtown Las Vegas, School of WOW for Leaders features call shadowing with our Customer Loyalty Team, call center-related presentations, and a Q & A panel with CLT leaders. Our Frontline option brings the training straight to you and your team. Not only does it cover the nuts and bolts of stellar customer service, but it can also be customized to meet your team’s needs.
When Zappos first began, it was all about the shoes. There was a gap in the online marketplace for buying shoes online and in 1999, Zappos was created to fill it. The main goal would be to provide the best online selection of shoes. But then something happened that changed the company’s focus – that something was what is now known as the first WOW letter.
In January 2000, a customer emailed Zappos to describe her recent shopping experience. She tried ordering two different pairs of shoes, both of which were unavailable, but that wasn’t why she contacted us. It was the fast, courteous response of the Zappos Customer Loyalty Team as well as receiving both a gift certificate and a t-shirt for the inconvenience that WOW’ed her. That feedback changed the focus of Zappos: What if the company focused not solely (see what we did there?) on what it sold, but how it sold it? What if Zappos focused on WOWing its customers? “We asked ourselves what we wanted this company to stand for,” said CEO Tony Hsieh, “we didn’t want to sell just shoes. I wasn’t even into shoes – but I was passionate about customer service.”
These days, you can find much more than just shoes on Zappos. Clothing, housewares, accessories, outdoor gear, you name it. But after 15 years, offering the best customer service experience is what Zappos continues to strive for. Each new employee goes through a rigorous month-long training that focuses on nothing but customer service. They spend 40 hours on the phones helping our customers because regardless of the specific department they were hired for, customer service is the priority. Each holiday season when call volume goes up, everyone in the company pitches in and jumps on the phones because we want to maintain the same level of service no matter how busy it gets. Everything we do as a company goes back to customer service.
As Zappos started to become known for these customer service standards, people began asking how they were developed and if other companies could implement them. In 2008, Zappos Insights was created to address such interest and develop different offerings for other companies. With tens of thousands of requests for a customer service-specific training, we are beyond thrilled to introduce our latest Zappos Insights offering, the School of WOW.