Los Angeles — A potential Dollar Shave Club customer laid down an unusual challenge to the company on its Facebook page not long ago. In exchange for his pledge to order a one-month subscription of razors, an employee had to solve a Rubik’s Cube in two minutes or less. 

The following afternoon, Dollar Shave Club posted a minute-and-25-second clip of a member service agent feverishly answering the challenge standing next to a framed sign of the company’s tag line, “Our Blades Are … Great,” with its only slightly censored F-word.

The spontaneous response was applauded on Facebook. And it reinforced how the company wants to be viewed: cool, funny and willing to do almost anything to please a member.

It’s all part of the customer service strategy for Dollar Shave Club, a quickly growing Los Angeles company with 2.2 million members known best for its viral commercials and wisecracking founder.

The company employs about three dozen member service agents who answer phones and emails, conduct online chats and reply to queries on social media — all while channeling the brand’s distinctly playful and irreverent tone.

The strategy isn’t easy. Training takes weeks. Finding the right personalities is challenging. It would be cheaper and less hassle to contract with a third-party customer service firm, which Dollar Shave Club does to complement its in-house team.

But online retailers, including pioneers Zappos and Bonobos, have found the investment in unscripted customer service worthwhile. The interactions, they say, feel more authentic and help humanize e-commerce brands that are, by their very nature, faceless.

Do it right and a company can even benefit from free buzz on social media. A handful of memorable Dollar Shave Club exchanges have been posted by members on Reddit and Twitter.

The approach is “high cost, difficult to execute, but the word of mouth” makes it worth it, said Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali, an analyst at Forrester Research.

That’s imperative for leading online retailers like the Amazon-owned Zappos, which relies on repeat customers and word-of-mouth marketing to power its $2 billion in annual sales.

The Las Vegas seller of shoes and apparel has been at the forefront of unscripted customer relations and instills what it calls “WOW” service in its 600 agents through a seven-week training course. That results in some extreme cases of customer satisfaction, like the time an agent was compelled to visit a rival shoe store to fill an order Zappos couldn’t because it didn’t have the right size.

“It certainly would be cheaper” to contract out customer service, said Kelly Wolske, who trains Zappos’ customer loyalty team. “But it wouldn’t be better. Seventy-five percent of sales come from return customers, so it’s important for us to control the customer experience as much as possible.”

A similar approach is taken by online clothing retailer Bonobos, which employs a team of 40 customer service “ninjas,” who are encouraged to be playful and spontaneous with customers. Many are recent college grads, aspiring comedians and actors.

“Rather than looking at customer service as an expense, we see it as a fundamental investment, just as we invest in the design and quality of our clothing product,” said Melissa Baird, vice president of operations and product for Bonobos.

Customer service is a regular budget item for Dollar Shave Club, which has raised $148 million from investors, but has yet to make a profit since its founding in 2012. The company recently moved into a new headquarters and is projected to post more than $140 million in revenue this year.

Company leaders say the time a customer service representative speaks to members is the only chance to pamper them and make them feel like they belong to an exclusive club. Agents are allotted a budget to send gifts — like the “Godfather” DVD box set sent to the member who joked that being in Dollar Shave Club was like being in the “family.”

When another customer complained of the difficulty shaving her legs because she was pregnant with twins and couldn’t see her toes, a customer service agent mailed a free pedicure set and a collection of baby books.

“They put a lot of trust in us,” said Jackie Resnick, a 23-year-old member service team member. “And you can’t mess up. Once you put it on the Internet, it’s out there forever.”

Indeed, one interaction posted on Reddit included a member service agent playing along with a customer who joked that an ancient order of clean shaven monks had stolen his shipment.

Another member tweeted an exchange in which a Dollar Shave Club representative wouldn’t confirm or deny he was a well-programmed customer service bot.

“We have taken great pains to develop this brand experience,” said Michael Dubin, chief executive of Dollar Shave Club, which provides members with a subscription of razor blades that costs $3 to $9 a month.

“There have always been places to buy razors on the Internet; we’re not the first and not the last,” he added. “What we’re doing very different from everybody else is building a lifestyle brand.”

The approach appears to be paying off.

Dollar Shave Club has doubled its membership in less than 10 months and says it owns 16 percent of the U.S. cartridge market by volume, which places it just ahead of Schick as the nation’s second-biggest brand.