Customers Centric

At the Emerging Technology Conference last month I attended several of the sessions where Amazon staff talked about their web-services infrastructure. What they're attempting to do here is very interesting, and I'm sure we'll write more about it at a later date, but today I want to rant about Amazon's approach to customer service. Jeff Bezos is very fond of saying that Amazon is trying to be the most customer centric company on Earth, and this statement was repeated numerous times by the Amazon staff at ETConf.

Every time I hear them say this, however, it irks me more and more, because any time my dealings with Amazon have been problematic, the level of service has been be rather poor.

I don't doubt Amazon's sincerity in this regard, but I think they've got their terminology slightly wrong. I think they're actually striving to be the most "customers centric" company rather than "customer centric". Of course this doesn't sound as good - in fact it just sounds wrong - but I think it's closer to the truth.

For the most part, Amazon "just works". They've put a lot of effort, and spent a lot of money, attempting to ensure that this is the case. And in many of my dealings, and those of other people I've talked to about it, everything goes smoothly, and Amazon is a delight to use.

But when things go wrong somewhere, and you fall through the cracks, everything starts to fall apart and Amazon's customer service staff don't seem to be able to cope. They've probably got their systems working just fine 99.9% of the time now (and with half a million dollars worth of sales per hour, they really need to be), but it's when they don't that the customer relationship is at the most risk - and Amazon are terrible at handling this.

Their customer service staff are notorious for not reading your email carefully, instead latching on to the first phrase in it that they have a stock answer for. I've had cases where this happened 3 or 4 times about the same matter before finally finding someone prepared to actually take the time to understand the problem.

When we built BlackStar we decided to take a different approach. Because we didn't really have a lot of money or time to make our systems work quite as well, we aimed for making 90% of orders flow smoothly - and made sure that staff were able to deal with all the cases that fell through the cracks. Sometimes this could be done without the customer ever knowing, but we also made sure that our Care team were able to deal one by one with individual customers with problems rather than working with the abstract concept of all customers.

A few interesting things happened from this:

Firstly, we got to see which areas were taking up the most time, and so had a clear indication of where to spend our development resources. We didn't spend a lot of time perfecting systems that weren't really causing a lot of problems but were able to focus at the major bottlenecks and problem areas.

Secondly, we found that customers actually seemed to like this approach. I've heard it said that a customer whose complaint is handled well ends up being more loyal than a customer with no complaints - and this definitely seemed to be the case. Our customers seemed impressed with the level of individual attention they received, and that paid off for us.

Thirdly, we found that this was even truer for our "power users". The customers who tended to buy the most from us tended to have the most problems, but by handling their problems properly we actually got to know some of them quite well. It turned out that most of them had previously shopped with our competitors, had eventually had a problem, received the customary terrible service, and promptly started shopping elsewhere.

These customers were even more impressed with how we handled such cases as they were able to compare it with what they'd experienced elsewhere, and many of them remained customers for a very long time. There are two main approaches you can take to dealing with problem cases. You can either put your efforts into ensuring they never happen (as Amazon seem to do), or accept that they will happen and put your efforts into being able to handle them well when they do (as we did at BlackStar). Of course both are important, but focussing on the first seems to make it harder to achieve the second, whereas starting from the second seems to give a better foundation for achieving the first.

Whether you can work this way if you outsource Customer Service, as Amazon do, (and whether you can actually claim to be customer centric if you do so), is an interesting question, and one we'll no doubt return to later.