A Zappos employee broke the record for the longest customer service call ever at 10 hours and 43 minutes
Zappos
Zappos employee Steven Weinstein, shown here in the retailer’s Las Vegas headquarters, holds the record for longest Zappos customer service call.
A Zappos employee recently had a customer service call that lasted 10 hours and 43 minutes, breaking an internal record at the Amazon-owned online retailer.
On June 11, in Zappos’ Las Vegas headquarters, Steven Weinstein answered a call from a customer who needed some help with an order of a few items. The two began to chat, and even after she was helped, she stayed on the line.
“It was excellent, the connection was amazing and even though I never spoke to this customer before in my life, I felt like I knew her for 15 or 20 years,” Weinstein told Business Insider in an email. “It was just natural and time was flowing — it felt like it was effortless.”
Weinstein said he only took one break during the nearly 11-hour period, about two-and-a-half hours on, to go to the bathroom. One of his colleagues brought him food and water during the call.
Zappos is an online store that sells shoes and apparel, which on its own, isn’t very exciting. That’s why the company’s CEO Tony Hsieh, who’s led the company since 2000, decided from the beginning to make customer service the company’s main product. The thinking was you could buy shoes anywhere, but if you could get them from an online store that went the extra mile to please you, then you’d become a loyal customer.
Hsieh’s guidance resulted in an obsession with pleasing the customer, and call center employees were encouraged to stay on the line for as long as necessary. Another one of Hsieh’s tenets is to “create fun and a little weirdness,” and when employees combined this with customer service, it resulted in employees going on marathon calls.
At Zappos, call center employees are trained to use interactions with customers as a way to build relationships, not make a sale. And if a call is going long during a particularly busy time, then it’s up to the employee overseeing the call center to assign more people to calls rather than encourage an employee to end a call early.
The last longest customer service call was set by Mary Tennant in 2012, at nine hours and 37 minutes. Weinstein said that during his call he didn’t stay on the line for so long “just for the sake of breaking” the record, but because he wanted to impress his customer.
“The connection was so strong that we could have talked for 18 hours if we really wanted,” he said.
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