Any Amazon product manager out there?
I rarely use twitter to complain about a product or service but earlier this week I did it for the second time ever and it was about Amazon. They responded and eventually solved my problem. But I’m still puzzled by my experience and am very curious about the product thinking behind it. I know Amazon prides itself in customer-centric thinking and even keeps an empty seat representing a customer at every internal meeting. So the experience I had seemed very odd and wasn’t what I expected from Amazon at all.
I ordered a small appliance on Amazon. 2 days later the status showed that the package had been delivered and “was handed directly to a resident” by Amazon Logistics. However we never received it. Thanks to our new Ring doorbell we have proof. Knowing Amazon works hard to design great user experience I was expecting a link or button for lost package on the order list — figured it’s a common use case for mail orders. But after staring at the page for a long while and trying various links I couldn’t find it. I even vaguely remember seeing/using a similar option a few years back but now it’s nowhere to be found. So I tried the next option — writing a product review to complain about it. I wrote an honest and harmless review saying I was disappointed after not receiving the product. 10 minutes later I got an email saying my review could not be posted since it violated Amazon guidelines. I wonder who reviewed it. If it’s a machine then it’s rather slow. If it’s a human, then why wouldn’t they try to help me or forward to their support team? Running out of options, I tweeted to amazon’s twitter account. After a few minutes Amazon’s support account tweeted back pointing me to a web page specifically set up for anyone complaining on social media to give them more details so they can help you. Funny they bothered to set up web page for the complainers but wouldn’t make it easy to report on a lost package from the order site? They would sensor review complaining about Amazon’s service knowing full well that one can always post the same to twitter or facebook? Then the support email came stating that a new package would be sent to me. The next paragraph though stated if I didn’t return the original package back to Amazon within 30 days they would charge my credit card. My guess was it’s copied from the product return email. I emailed back to clarify and got the confirmation the return clause was included by mistake.
I finally received my appliance and am still confused by the experience. It felt like Amazon had no good process for lost package which seems like a common scenario. They’ve been in the business for so long and I find it hard to believe no product manager ever thought about this critical user journey. Alternatively maybe Amazon deliberately made the process painful to reduce false positives? But there seems so many low hanging fruit ways to provide a much better experience without being too costly for Amazon — eg. the relevant FAQ linked from the order status or a wizard guiding you through likely scenarios/decision tree. Just like how search engines’ qualities are judged by the rare, infrequent queries, and a person’s character is judged by their actions under stress, I imagine a retailer’s customer service quality is most evident when things don’t go smoothly. On this aspect, Amazon gets a “needs improvement” rating from me.
Oh and one last thing, the support team automatically addressed me as Mrs. Wang —but I never took my husband’s name. So I kindly recommended unconscious bias training in my reply and of course was ignored.