> There is no doubt that Amazon is good to its customers.
Seriously? They are my go-to example of being too-big-to-care. In my experience they are "good to customers" only so long as the customer is near the peak of the bell curve. Do anything in the shoulder and you begin to see the customer service unravel. Get out in the long tail and there is none.
I know there are Amazonians in our community and I hope they don't take this the wrong way. What amazon does well they do extremely well. But if they are to fix the things they fall down on they must, as in the famed 12-step program, first admit there's a problem. I'm happy to provide an extensive (but hardly exhaustive) list of issues I've personally found, all of which I guarantee to be substantive, but I do not think it is on topic for this thread.
> Everybody I know who works for the company, from Jeff Bezos on down, talks about how the company puts customers first.
Whether they do this because they believe it to be true would be an interesting discussion to have with Bezos. He has to know there's a percentage of people like me. If he thinks our issues are substantive and truly wants to put the customer first, you'd think he'd be reaching out to us. However, if he thinks there is no substance to our issues and claims, then he's surprisingly clueless. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle. Perhaps he doesn't know how to make VRM work in such a way as to effectively solicit our feedback.
> They do that, I think, mostly with low prices and efficient delivery. But one does wonder about other costs, such as the ones cited below.
To the extent that you pay a higher price if they believe you are price insensitive, that whole "low prices" thing is a myth. Those who care and price shop are detected with a high degree of effectiveness and become the public voice attesting to the low prices. Those who are less likely to notice pay more and - by definition - they don't notice. The argument in favor of this practice is that the people paying more value other things such as service. But I bristle over that claim because a) it's based on deception; and b) you have to deliver great service to make the claim.
That leaves efficient delivery. You cannot *be* an online retailer if you cannot deliver the products people buy. Is the ability to deliver the products really the bar we set for exceptional quality of an online retailer? I thought that would be the table stakes. There is something to be said in minimizing exceptional cases but at the end of the day what defines great customer service is how you handle exceptions. Amazon seems to me to be so focused on minimizing the exceptions that they figure they do not need to set a high standard when it comes to resolving them.
One would hope that any discussion of good companies would include their internal policies, but if we are limiting to Johannes' original criteria of companies that are good to their customers Amazon aint it. When he posed the original question I was unable to think of a single company to nominate. Part of the problem is that I'm old and my experience of great customer service was the indoctrination I received when I hired on at Publix. They never aspired to be better than the competition. They aspired to be great as measured on objective criteria. Nowadays companies seem to measure their performance relative to other companies. Those who have become King of the Hill don't seem to notice it's a dung hill, but oh how they celebrate being on top.
Kind regards,
-- T.Rob
T.Robert Wyatt, Managing partner
IoPT Consulting, LLC
+1 704-443-TROB
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