Billion-Dollar Empathy in Customer Service: Borrow the Zappos Blueprint And Revolutionize Your Business

____

Before the article starts: An advertisement for myself.

Hi, I'm Micah Solomon - Customer Service Consultant. I offer customer service improvement consulting, training, and eLearning creation. Please reach out to me by text: 484-343-5881 • email: micah@micahsolomon.com • or via my website: micahsolomon.com or of course via LinkedIn: Micah Solomon - Customer Service Consultant

____

Empathy in customer service goes beyond meeting basic expectations. Customer service empathy is about understanding customers in a memorable way. This can happen when an employee takes extra action tailored to a customer’s needs or uses words that forge an emotional connection beyond a simple transaction. At Zappos, a company whose fortunes and reputation have ebbed and flowed but are always known for its commitment to “Delivering WOW,” the telephone is their primary tool for creating these moments, serving as a powerful channel to build customer loyalty.

How They Do It

At Zappos, “Wow” is built on what I’d call “creative empathy,” and is more than a catchphrase. Rather, it’s the foundation of every customer interaction. Zappos refers to its service team as the Customer Loyalty Team, emphasizing a commitment to empathetic customer service on each call. “We want to make every customer feel special on each call,” they explain. Hear a dog in the background? Ask about their pets. Hear a child? Connect over family.  Or, perhaps most often, the connection is made by fully engaging with the details of the customer’s issue or request, but in a warm, personal, empathetic way that goes beyond mere information.

Consider the case of one particularly emphatic and experienced Zappos representative. When a customer called about the struggle of finding comfortable narrow shoes for an upcoming family wedding, the employee empathized and joked, “Honestly, ‘narrows’ are the worst! It’s like the whole industry is against narrow feet!” Then, the employee shared a story about her own aunt with narrow feet, creating an instant bond. Together, they found the perfect pair for the occasion, and the customer felt not only understood but hopeful.

In other instances, an empathic customer service representative might “wow” customers by upgrading shipping, so a pair of shoes arrives in time for an event, or even letting a customer keep a mis-shipped item to donate to charity instead of going through the hassle of a return. While some of these actions may have a direct cost, they create goodwill that lasts long after the call ends. More importantly, Zappos has found that “wow” service doesn’t always need to cost extra—it just requires a little breathing space.

 Creating the “Breathing Space” to delivery true customer service empathy

Breathing space—sufficient-and-then-some staffing and more is built into the Zappos contact center’s structure. Zappos operates at an occupancy rate of 60-70%, versus an industry standard of nearly 80%. Occupancy rate is the term for a measure of the percentage of time agents spent on calls versus the time they're clocked in.. The reason for this lower rate? At Zappos, creating an emotional connection with each caller means call length can vary. A quick connection might be sharing a joke, while some conversations become heart-to-heart exchanges, such as empathy for a grieving spouse asking what to do with a recent shoe order intended for a loved one who has passed.

 This flexibility is also essential in Zappos’s hiring and training process. Finding employees with the empathy and patience to go the extra mile takes time, and Zappos invests six weeks of training for new hires. At the end of this training, employees are even offered a month’s salary to leave if they don’t feel fully committed to providing “wow” service on every call.

Why Empathy in Customer Service Needs Organizational Support

For  empathy in custom service to truly flourish, it needs backing from all levels of an organization. Often, companies cut back on the “breathing space” needed for exceptional service, from reducing training time to tightening occupancy rates to save costs. But cutting these resources can prevent frontline employees from having the flexibility to make genuine connections.