Zappos is a standout website in online retail because its one of the few pureplay websites to emerge from the dotcom bust. Most of the surviving web businesses ended up being brands with a pre-established strong catalog and/or store presence. Pureplay dotcom-boom hype sites for the most part evaporated. Amazon of course survived and so did a very young Zappos. Today Zappos does more than $1 billion (yes that's billion) in shoes online. How did that happen? Zappos is famous for way over the top customer service and thus the word spread virally through online and offline customer evangelism (consistent with the strategic focus of my friends at Bazaarvoice).
Recently, I discovered that one of their tricks to building a strong customer- focused culture and building a world class Zappos team is through their hiring practices. Through what I consider to be an exceptionally unusual but very innovative strategy, Zappos offers to pay employees $1,000 to quit! If after your initial training and familiarization process has occurred at Zappos and you are not confident that you want or can handle the expectations in front of you, you are offered "$1,000 - no questions asked" to quit. Although initially one would think that this is a dotcom oddity, this strategy in the long run is likely to be a cost savings and business growing strategy. With extremely happy customers and extremely happy employees, $1,000/head to cull the dead wood is a steal.
Below is an interview with Bill Taylor from HarvardBusiness.org that describes this unusual but highly innovative idea.
