Customer Service Return To Customer Service

7 Customer Service Lessons from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

SalesForce.com by Kevin Baldacci June 2013

The latest results from the American Customer Satisfaction Index reveals Amazon.com as the reigning and undisputed champ in both Internet retailing and across the entire department in overall customer satisfaction. Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos perhaps more than any business leader has taken the philosophy of truly caring for the customer and ushered it into the digital era. Bezos has built a company from the ground up purely based off of the unbending, unyielding philosophy of serving the customer across all departments. With a 164 million Amazon customers, few would argue Bezos as the key architect of building an authentic, customer-centric company.

1. Don’t Just Listen to Your Customers, Understand Them

“Everyone has to be able to work in a call center.”

As part of a training session each year, Jeff Bezos asks thousands of Amazon managers, including himself, to attend two days of call-center training. Most likely this was a doctrine borrowed from the U.S. Marines as all marines, regardless of rank, are trained to be a rifleman first. Nonetheless, the incentive here is for managers to immediately be placed in the mindset that Amazon’s philosophy is about listening, and most importantly, understanding the customer. It’s easy to listen to customers. However the first step of every employee must be to understand them and their needs in order to successfully better the organization.

2. Serve the Needs of the Customer

“We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.”

The Kindle tablet came into existence purely defined by customers’ desires rather than engineers’ preferences and personal preferences. What was remarkable was that Bezos hardly faltered in creating a product built for the customer even after it took years to construct the right hardware. One finance executive in particular learned quickly of his philosophy when he asked Bezos how much he was prepared to spend on the Kindle project, where the CEO quickly replied: “How much do we have?”

Business leaders must never stray from the overall fact that the customer pays the wages at your company (an old Henry Ford quote) determine what they need and work to serve them. During the next evaluation of a product or service team, stop thinking about how you can make the product or organization better and start thinking about how you can make your customers more successful.

3. The Empty Chair: The Most Important Person in the Room

“Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.”

Even during the fledgling days of Amazon, Bezos worked hard to establish the philosophy of a company that obsesses over their customers from top to bottom. An overwhelming figure that used to always set the tone of his meetings was “the empty chair.” Early on, Bezos brought an empty chair into meetings and informed his top executives that they should consider that seat occupied by their customer, “the most important person in the room.” Throughout these meetings, a different weight was held on all decisions as the invisible but clear presence of the customer was always accounted for.

4. Never Settle for 99%

“We’re not satisfied until it’s 100%.”

In the December of 2011, Jeff Bezos was “very proud” that Amazon was able to hit the unfathomable goal of delivering his promise to get packages to 99.9% of his customers before Christmas. No small feat transporting millions of packages worldwide and missing their mark on a handful of deliveries in just a few, short nights. To Bezos, though, there is still room for improvement as he stated: “We’re not satisfied until it’s 100%.”

As your customer service team continues aiming to hit response time goals to customers and improve satisfaction ratings never settle for 99% – always shoot for 100. In today’s age, customers are talking to one another and are referring companies that provide a more satisfactory customer experience. And they’re paying more to ensure this (just look at Amazon).

5. Respect Today’s Customer

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000.”

As one of the original ecommerce pioneers, there can be little argument that Bezos click to continue reading.

Check out the Salesforce website for more information on Sales, Marketing, Customer Service and more.