How Supply Chain Service Drives Customer’s Loyalty – My customer Experience with Zappos

Being a supply chain professional, the “sad” thing is that I always translate my real life experience into supply chain practices and theories. This time, I would like to tell a story of my Zappos ordering experience and how I see their supply chain service.

I was shopping for a pair of shoes for my wedding. I didn’t buy the shoes from a local store because I wanted to find something cheaper. The first thought coming to my mind for online shoes shopping is Zappos, which can explain the good reputation of Zappos being the leader of online shoes shopping.

The goal of supply chain management is to provide the right product at the right place with right price. Online shopping eliminates the barrier of place, but it requires an efficient delivery. On their easy to navigate website, I found the style of shoes I was looking for at a discounted price (supply chain theory: availability of right product at right price). It showed three pairs in stock for my size, so I placed my order online.  In 10 minutes after completing the entire transaction, I felt I should have waited to search more options, so I wanted to cancel the order. Then I realized Zappos didn’t provide me the option to cancel online. I had to call their 24 hours customer service hotline. With my professional habit, I also measured how long I was waiting while calling customer service, roughly 30 seconds. Since 24-hour service is provided, the waiting time of less than one minute is more than acceptable, although I wished they provided me the option of online cancellation to eliminate my call to their CS.

Shortly after I cancelled the order, I decided to order the shoes again. What an unpredictable customer behavior…However, when I tried to place a new order online, I noticed that their stock availability became two. My supply chain instinct told me that their stock availability was not updated simultaneously when my first order was cancelled. I decided to call CS and see if they could reactive my old order, instead of placing a new one.

Samantha in CS answered my call (now she @samiamquinn is my twitter follower @BettyFeng and following because of my tweet about Zappos CS). Over the phone, I could feel her warm personality and joyful smile, totally contradictory to the cold voice of a CS from CHASE credit card I recently experienced.  She placed a new order for me and upgraded my order to VIP for next business day delivery. Samantha explained that since my order was placed after cutoff time, I should receive my order on Monday morning. As someone working in logistics, I fully understood what cutoff time meant, so I didn’t expect my order to be batch processed until the next morning and picked up by their carrier UPS at the end of the next day.

To my surprise, I received shoes from Zappos the next morning! I have shopped online many times before but never experienced such quick delivery. As a regular customer with knowledge of supply chain management, Zappos order processing and fulfillment amazed me. The order was placed at 10:30pm in the night, shipped out of the Zappos warehouse in Shepherdsville, KY, and delivered to my home in Orlando, FL at 11:15am the next day.  The whole process can be illustrated as the following:

The email time stamp of order shipping confirmation was 2:30am, so it’s from a 24 hours operated warehouse. I looked up all of flights from Louisville to Orlando in the early morning for more insight. It seems only the flight was leaving at 5:46am and arriving at 10:03am could make the final delivery at 11:15am.

Needless to say, with my knowledge in order management, I understand how many activities and challenges are behind this 13-hour process from order to delivery.  The speed of order processing and delivery is something extraordinary. For regular order processing, it normally takes one or even two days lead-time to let the system batch process customer orders and check their credit,  then have the warehouse pack the product and ship it out by the end of the business day. Below are three key components to enable Zappos make a delivery at such speed:

1. 24 hours customer service. I’m guessing Samantha in CS kindly manually processed my credit and dropped my order to a delivery request. Generally the late night order is after the cut-off time so it’s unlikely to have been processed by a system batch job.
2. 24 hours warehouse operation. This is the most important factor for their incredible speed. Without 24 hours operation in the warehouse, the delivery request will not be picked, packed and shipped by early morning for a late night order.
3. Close partner relationship with UPS for early morning pick-up, or multiple pick-ups in a day. This is most likely the reason why Zappos’ warehouse is located close to UPS’ main global hub in Louisville, KY.

Like Zappos’ logo indicated: powered by service. Zappos uses customer service as their brand to achieve customer loyalty, especially when customers have a lot of choices. Zappos demonstrated to me an exceptional example of customer service not only through their CS rep, but also through their supply chain. Their supply chain system and management for order fulfillment is overall robust and agile, except the fact that I can’t cancel an order online and their stock availability can’t be updated immediately after order cancelation. I mentioned in my earlier article that supply chain is a revenue driver, because supply chain services of order fulfillment and on-time delivery directly impact customer satisfaction and loyalty. I know the case I just experienced with Zappos was extraordinary, but you can expect that I will be their long term customer after such a great experience and will happily recommend Zappos to others. I also believe that a company willing to do extraordinary things for their customers with a higher standard of supply chain service will be competitive and successful for the long term.