In a recent techdirt blog entry, Mike Masnick comments on Zappos legendary customer service. This story is making the rounds today because of a recent Harvard Business article detailing their unusual practice of paying new customer service employees $1000 to quit, which on first pass seems a tiny bit weird. It works out that only 10% of the new recruits take them up on the offer. The other 90% apparently have decided that they like the job, company, future prospects, etc. At Zappos, customer service is not viewed as a necessary evil cost center, to be squeezed for every last dime of savings. Instead it seems that the agents are viewed as customer retention and loyalty specialists. This jives well with the common belief that it's much more expensive to acquire a new customer than to get repeat sales from existing ones.
Similarly, Subaru has decided that garbage is an asset. (Well almost). Its plant in Indiana recycles 99.8 percent of all waste. The other 0.2 percent either gets burned to make energy, or is medical or toxic waste that must be disposed of in specific ways by law.
And then there is the "no haggle" or "value" pricing of some car brands, led by GM's Saturn. What do all three of these examples have in common? They all are cases of companies turning a necessary evil of doing business into a competitive advantage. This may not be possible in all cases, but asking "how can this expense be used to make the company stronger?" seems like a valuable question to ask from time to time.
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