Say you’re hired for a new job. At the end of a four-week training period, your new boss offers you a big bonus to quit right then. Would you stay on the job, or take the money and run?
Zappos employees interact on Twitter.
Think of it as an employer’s test for whether you’ve come on board for the money or for love of the job.
That’s the strategy online shoe-retail giant Zappos is using to cultivate a more committed customer service staff. Zappos, which has banked on strong customer service to grow its business, offers all of its new call center employees $1,000 to walk away after training. Apparently, new hires turn down the buyout offer 90 percent of the time.
Judging from the glowing customer testimonials on their website, Zappos’s gambit seems to be paying off.
The Harvard Business Review has more.
(HT: CT2)
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The comments above me are remarkably cynical! A lot of people are making some massive assumptions, especially not knowing what the benefits package is for working there, or the salary. A call center job does not have to be miserable; it is ususally the company’s policies that make it so.
$1000 isn’t really enough to see if people are in it “for the money”. Even at minimum wage, it’s easy to see that it won’t take long to earn past $1000.
Offer $5000 or $10000, and then maybe we’ll be talking about something interesting.
So many bitter people commenting! Whatever Zappos is doing, it must be working. Their customer service and corporate culture is wonderful, and I’d not consider buying shoes anywhere else.
Having their CEO and several employees on Twitter, all of whom interact in fun and unusual ways with other Twitter folks, is a great thing. Maybe it’s just a marketing tool, but they genuinely seem like nice people who are doing what they love.
Can YOU say that about your job?
More than a few people have suggested that this idea may be ripe for abuse. That people would spend four weeks (160 hours) of their life in training for the money.
I absolutely disagree with this notion. First of all, the training is not valuable to anyone but a potential Zappos employee. Knowing how to recommend an alternative pair of shoes won’t help you in any other job. And who has time to waste 4 weeks of their time to pull off this little “scam”?
Have any of you ever had a call center job? First of all, you don’t make $3000 a month (at least in Portland). It’s more like around $1600. Call centers have insanely bad turnover. I worked in one for just over two month – there were new hires every single week but the business was not expanding. People were quitting every couple weeks in droves large enough to require hiring 10 people every week. The hours are miserable, the working conditions, worse, you’re constantly surrounded by chatter that invades your brain.
A CSR who is not “in it for the money”? Of course you’re in it for the money, the job is awful. Unless Zappos is magically the best call center in the history of call centers, those people refusing the bonus are nuts.
“Unless Zappos is magically the best call center in the history of call centers, those people refusing the bonus are nuts.”
Considering Zappos doesn’t rate CSRs based on metrics like call time, and actually empower them to go out of their way to help customers, it’s actually not that far fetched to say, yes, Zappos is magically the best call center in the history of call centers.
The posters above generally don’t understand the economics of employee turnover. It may be easiest to cite Henry Ford; he put in the $5 day back in 1914 not to enable workers to buy Model T’s but to reduce turnover. If I remember correctly, Ford’s turnover was something near 100% every 3 months, meaning some jobs were likely turning over every few days.
Same general idea here: Zappos culls those who would quit and the employees self-select to stay there, which means they are far more likely to stay (and likely to be productive as well). Reduce turnover, save money in the long run. Reducing turnover saves multiples of the costs of training a single employee – and the $1k bonus to leave is then merely a cost of training.
$1000 dollars is probably not that much more than a few weeks pay. Searching for a new job is a real pain. The only employees that would take the offer are the ones considering leaving already. Employees who are looking for a new job immediately after training are not likely to provide very much value. In customer service, dissatisfied employees can easily provide negative value. So encouraging such employees to move on instead of lingering for a few more weeks / months seems like a good idea to me.