Inconsistency

There is this pair of shoes I really want to return to Zappos. I keep on delaying on the return because the box is huge and is hard to bring it into the office. There is no rush thanks to the 365 days return policy.

On Friday night we happened to have rented a Zipcar and the post office is on our way. I decided it will be the perfect opportunity to drop off the shoes. I went on Zappos and try to log on but couldn’t. My browser usually have my username and password cookied and it was weird when the password didn’t auto-fill after I entered my email. I keep getting the same error message that the user id and password combination does not exist or something like that. I must have tried a thousand combinations and none worked. I tried retrieving it from the lost password twice but it didn’t send me anything.

I became really frustrated when I couldn’t log onto Zappos to get the return label in time for our Zipcar. The Live Chat has too long a wait so I left a message. I also decided to complain on Twitter, hoping they will find me so I don’t have to sit down and call them (multitasking has always been my thing so I hate phone calls).

No response yet the next AM. However, a response finally came in from someone at Zappos through Twitter at around 6pm (they had followed me on Twitter after Zappos was mentioned in my feed). It turns out to be Zappos CEO (I know because I watched him on the Web 2.0 Summit podcasts)! He was really nice and patience. He asked me to call customer rep but I told him the wait was too long. He ended up just helping me himself. In fact, after they found my tweet, Tony emailed me, a customer rep emailed me my password, and a customer rep called me. After a bit of troubleshooting with Tony, it turns out that I had entered the wrong email address (the browser auto-fill completed the wrong address).

I do think there is potentially an underlying usability issue with the error messages. If they have told me that the email address does not exist, it would have been solved without all this. They also haven’t tell me why I didn’t receive the lost password email twice(if a wrong email address is entered, it should return an error message).  But this post is about Zappos’ great customer service. There you go, another satisfaction post on the blogosphere.

Zappos’ CEO at Web 2.0 Summit this year (good jokes throughout):

technorati tags: zappos, customer, service, tony, hsieh, rep