In December 2012, a Zappos customer service representative took a phone call that lasted 10 hours and 43 minutes.
Not a typo. Nearly eleven hours. One call.
Now, at almost any other company on earth, that representative would have been fired, or at minimum pulled into a meeting about efficiency metrics.
Zappos issued a press release about it.
They were proud. That was the point.
To understand why a company would celebrate the single most expensive phone call in its history, you have to understand that Zappos was never really in the shoe business.