The spirit of service that Hsieh built at Zappos really was revolutionary. And he did it for something as banal as shoes! Here I am fighting with @OliverCabell on the sixth email because their shoes took a month+ to arrive to where I no longer am. They'd like $75 to do a refund? 
And irony is that I was ordering a replacement pair for shoes that had been worn out. I was a repeat customer! Wanting to give them more money! Would probably just had kept buying those same shoes for years. Now it'll instead be NEVER AGAIN.
Companies like @OliverCabell will spend massively on new customer acquisition, then turn around and squander it all with this perverse abdication of responsibility (what? shipping? that's not us!). Hsieh saw that as an industry-wide malady, and brought the healing.
The thread in @heyhey for this is just 🤯. I don't really thought they'd eventually get it! Kept throwing good attention after a bad company. Shame on me.
Ended up getting the refund I requested literally 7 times. Appreciate it! Still going to try another shoe company for my next pair. Hopefully this is an opportunity to revamp policy. If it looks like there’s meaningful change, maybe I’ll try again next time.
https://twitter.com/olivercabell/status/1352316935384559617
But this is of course more than about shoes. It’s a mirror for anyone in charge of product and support policy. Are we making it hard for the people we’ve hired to help customers to actually help customers? It’s just about never the agents fault, almost always the policy.
And sometimes it’s not even the explicit policy, but the implicit one we project by our repeated dealings. Someone working support will quickly pickup “how we do things around here”. But virtually all would much rather just truly help customers set things right.
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