Zappos - Hiring People Passionate about Customers

Zappos is a very familiar, and very successful, online shoe company. Zappos is also a fascinating story of how a company was started with basically nothing in the late 1990s and now does over $1 billion in online sales - thanks according to its CEO and droves of customers because of their customer service. In his book Twitterville, Shel Israel writes about how passionate CEO Tony Hsieh is about customer service: first everyone, regardless of position is required to take Zappos' four week training course. Then if you successfully complete it you are given an offer of $2,000 not to take the job! He says he does this because he only wants people who committed to serving their customers. Apparently it works because over 90% want to stay. Israel, also describes how Zappos uses the social media network - particularly Twitter - as both an external and internal tool building and maintaining excellence in customer service.