Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Is Obsessed January 9, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Executive leadership.Tags: Amazon
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There was a very interesting article in this past Saturday’s New York Times called Put Buyers First? What a Concept. The author, Joe Nocera, wrote about how Amazon sent him a free replacement Playstation 3 (even though Amazon wasn’t at all to blame for the problem). I’m not sure if all firms should be shipping $500 items to every customer with his problem, but it probably makes sense if the customer is a writer for the New York Times 
[Take a look at "crowd mining" in the "required skills" section of my previous post: Trend Watch 2008 Wrap-Up]
In the article there was a great quote by Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos:
“And the reason I’m so obsessed with these drivers of the customer experience is that I believe that the success we have had over the past 12 years has been driven exclusively by that customer experience. We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them.”
My take: Well said! Bezos’ obsession with customer experience is what helped Amazon do so well in Forrester’s Customer Experience Rankings (they wound up 9th out of 112 firms).
The bottom line: I really like Jeff’s last sentence that paraphrases the mantra of Scenario Design: Who are your target customers? What are their goals? How can you help them accomplish those goals?
What a load of hooey. I still have the email i sent to Bezos (or whoever answers his emails) asking for my ten dollars back for a downloadable book that i couldn’t get to work.
While i was ‘referred’ to yet another customer service person and was eventually told that there was nothing they could do and they refused to refund me my money. Totally ticked off (particularly considering their customer first hooey) I emailed my address book and asked everyone to send an email to Bezos and his CSR asking to give Leigh her $10 back.
It took until around person 15 before I got the “we’ll make an exception for you this one time” and I finally got my ten bucks back. I feel kinda ripped off now I didn’t get a playstation.
(oh and in my email to Bezos I even found a quote very similar to the
one in the times article)
While I don’t want this blog to become a complaint board, Leigh’s experience provides a nice counterbalance to Joe’s. Lesson learned: Every company mistreats some customers.
Take a look at my previous post: “The Customer Is Not Always Right — Now What?”
http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2007/10/29/the-customer-is-not-always-right-now-what/
Bruce,
Just so. Leigh, I don’t know the circumstances of your experience (why the ebook didn’t work) but I had a similar trouble with an ebook. The problem turned out to be Adobe Reader and not Amazon. I recall (now, with embarrassment) yelling at the poor CSR at Amazon about it not working until he asked me whether I had checked to see if my Adobe Reader software had been enable for DRM materials. The fact that I didn’t know what he was talking about was pretty telling to him, and he did NOT take the opportunity to gloat. He did, however, give me an apparently super-secret customer service number at Adobe, and asked me to call him back if that didn’t fix it.
Well, by golly, it did.
My purpose wasn’t to be contrarian with your opinion, but to point out that customers are often NOT in the best position to troubleshoot complicated digital interactions, like my non-DRM enabled software.
However, given that Amazon knew this was frequently a problem, arming the rep with that information and suggesting I fix my software problem was the best they could do given the circumstances.
@ Eric
Point well taken however, my point to Amazon - i followed their instructions to the letter and it still didn’t work. But, let’s just say for arguments sake that it was my fault….
I still couldn’t get it to work.
I still had to go out and buy the book bc I needed it.
And I was still very unhappy as a long time Amazon customer.
(I have only gone back to ordering from them in the past six months after a very long hiatus)
What is the cost/benefit of giving me my $10 back vs. a very very unhappy customer who is going to email her entire network?
I believed in Jeff Bezo’s vision - I have always admired his blah de blah - I just wanted to see him put his money where his mouth was.
(and of course that is coming from someone who worked at one time as a waitress and at least twice took back orders I KNOW weren’t incorrect…when you live off tips to pay for your university tuition, the customer is ALWAYS right)
We had a good response to a customer service issue we had with Amazon. We use Amazon a LOT. Once we had ordered over 200 books in a single order, and were out of town, and had used a company credit card which needed to be verified, but as we were away and didn’t see our email to respond and verify, the order was automatically cancelled. We were very annoyed that the order wasn’t still in the system, and that we’d have to re-enter 200 books into the purchase list!
A rep at Amazon.com went through and found the ISBN numbers for each of those books to simplify our re-entering them. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but someone at Amazon spent a lot of time looking up our 200 books.
We have continued to have good experiences and responsive customer service on the very few times we’ve had a problem with an order. We always go to Amazon.com first when thinking of making any kind of online purchase, and happily recommend them and do so often.
On the other hand, when we get bad service, or a company does something wrong, we are also very motivated to share that information with the general public! See an ongoing saga with Schuco (a German company that wants to move into the American market) that was very short sighted in how it treated its first US customers and dealers…
http://replacementwindowdisasters.blogspot.com/
So good and bad customer service get reported.
Nonsense. I am in the midst of sorting out a purchase with Amazon for $1700 Panasonic video camera where they are 100% at fault. I have spoken with their customer service dept. on 5 different occasions over the last 3 days for a total in excess of 3 hours, including a supervisor in Washington State. They say things like, “the computer system is at fault” or “our billing department needs to look at this but they cannot be contacted directly” or “I have not heard back from our billing dept”.
Cause of issue was a glitch in their system that resulted in credit authorization getting garbled. Their system then resubmits for authorization which (properly) get rejected by credit card company. Throughout this I am told that their hands are tied and there is nothing they can do.
Their infrastructure and “system” is not customer focused. Their customer service staff is inefficacious. Their system’s people have no imagination to dream up the countless ways their system can fail due to current design.
Bezos’ obsession has, obviously, not filtered down to his staff or engineers.
As I see it, their niche is that they avoid sales tax. If that erodes, they are in deep trouble. Customer service is obviously NOT their forte.
My own take is that customer service should not be about solving put out fires but designing a system that avoids issues to begin with, ala Demming.
Don M, New York
I have had wonderful customer service experiences with Amazon, and once bought an item from a 3rd party vendor which was of very poor quality. After first attempting to work through the issue with the vendor, who refused to refund my money or pay the shipping costs of sending the items back to them, I contacted Amazon’s customer service. With no fuss whatsoever, the rep not only refunded my money, but also gave me a credit for the shippings costs I had incurred to send the items back. Not THAT is what I call excellent customer service!
Hopefully someone from Amazon.com will read this comment. I have been selling with Amazon for over two years, we were doing so well we were asked if we wanted an advanced selling account. I talked to the Amazon salesman at length and agreed when he told us that we could keep our old account so we could keep our old detail pages. Sells went up with the new account (over the past year) until a month ago we got an email from Amazon that we in violation having two selling accounts. I return the email saying the Amazon salesman said it was OK to do so. We contacted the salesman, after three phone calls and three emails, he email us saying we should do what every they asked. So we put in through regular channels a request to close the old account. seller-performance@amazon.com then terminated our account saying we had refused to make changes requested. A week later a guess a different part of Amazon sent an email asking which account we wanted close. I sent them an email saying to close the old one and asked them to tell the department who terminated our account. I also sent the sellercental four more emails asking to reinstate our account, but we have received no response. info@buddhasplace.com. Is there a manager I can talk to? Jeff
I’m sure that of Amazon’s millions of customers, there will always be some that are happy and some that are not. I have to say though that my recent interactions with Amazon (in the UK) have been excellent.
A few months back, I bought a product through Amazon from a third party. When the product turned out to be a French model with a UK power converter I cancelled the order, but the retailer only refunded the item price - not the postage. Amazon’s A-Z guarantee covered the postage and I was not left out of pocket (although Amazon should do more to stamp out this sort of practice - see http://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/2008/03/buyer-beware.htm).
More recently, a camera that I bought from Amazon stopped working (see http://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/2008/07/camera-warranty-not-worth-the-paper-its-written-on.htm). Amazon initially referred me to the manufacturer (Canon), who advised me to send it to an authorised repairer (at my cost) and they then said it had sand in it so it was not covered by the warranty. When I got the camera back, I opened it up and confirmed that some (very tiny) grains had been drawn back into the camera as the lens mechanism wound in - a design flaw. I then contacted Amazon, who sent me a replacement (at no cost to me - they offered a refund if I had preferred that) and even paid the postage for me to send the defective camera back to their returns centre.
Some might say that Amazon acted beyond their obligations - after all, Canon had told me that the warranty didn’t apply in this case. The point is that I am now one very happy customer and I’m telling everyone how great Amazon have been. That is why it is worth putting in the effort with customer service - something that seems to be all too rare in 2008.
Contacting Amazon via a web form is infuriating at times but, based on my recent experience, amazon.co.uk really do know how to deliver customer service (I can’t comment on amazon.com) and I felt that they should be given credit where credit is due.