Online retailer Zappos recently started paying employees up to $1500 to quit the company during initial training sessions. Is this just a PR stunt? Are they crazy?

The bottom line is that satisfied and happy employees provide great customer service. As a customer, who wants to deal with an unhappy employee? It affects the overall customer experience. I think this is a great idea for Zappos or for any other company to weed out employees who could potentially affect the customer experience in a negative way.

For instance, let’s say that I am a satisfied and loyal Zappos customer that spends on average $250/ year at Zappos.com. This means over the next 25 years I will spend $6,250. One day I get on the phone with an unsatisfied employee that really pisses me off. Because of this negative experience, I stop purchasing from Zappos. That’s $6,250 worth of potential revenue lost. How about if the unsatisfied employee pisses off four other similar customers in one month? Zappos will lose $31,250 worth of potential revenue just because one employee created a negative experience for five customers. Imagine if you had a couple more unsatisfied employees and they piss off at least 5 customers a month. You do the math. If you think $1,500 is too much to weed out unsatisfied employees think again.

Tags: Customer Experience, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, zappos

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Customer Experience, customer service, retail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.