The real reason why Amazon is crushing it.
I just got off the phone with customer support of some e-commerce store.
And it’s the second time I was on the phone with them.
After I sent them three emails. And they responded to none of them…
The first time I called them up the guy even promised me to send me an email the following day to let me know what’s wrong with my order. Which of course, he didn’t…
So I called back today. Only to find out he will let me know what’s going on next week.
It’s already more than 10 days since I placed my order. And I was told to get it after 3 days.
So here’s the thing…
For one of my businesses I’m ordering a couple of hundred products a month from Amazon. And ocasionally I order stuff from other shops when they’re sold out on Amazon.
So maybe 1 out of 200 orders is from a shop other than Amazon.
And I’m not joking when I tell you that every 10th order or so from another shop has problems.
But not just a tiny problem like a few days late or so. No, I’m talking about deliveries disappearing and no one being able to tell me where it is.
Now that’s not such a big deal either if they’d be able to properly handle this.
But the thing is they don’t…
What most stores do instead is to tell you they’re going to investigate it.
And whenever they tell me they’ll investigate it and let me know what’s wrong I already know that I have to call them up again a couple of days later.
Because they don’t respond to emails. And if they do, they tell me to wait some more. But I don’t want to wait. I just want my problem to be solved and out of my head. And I can’t want to constantly call people.
Now enter Amazon… and by the way I’m not getting paid to say any of this nor do I hold any shares in Amazon. It’s just my own personal experience.
So here’s the thing…
I order hundreds of products on Amazon every single month. So I expect a couple of things to go wrong on Amazon, too. No biggie! And a couple of things do indeed go wrong there, too. Maybe 1 out of 200 orders has a problem.
Some packages go lost somewhere along the way, which by the way happens more often than you might think… An item that was obviously already shipped to someone else before. You know. The usual suspects.
But here’s the difference. And that’s a REALLY big difference…
And that’s basically the difference why pretty much every other e-commerce site will die and Amazon will thrive even more…
I never ever had to pick up the phone to solve an issue I had with a delivery from Amazon. I usually just sent them a message through their system. And every single time I get a response in less than an hour.Less than an hour!
Sure, all responses are simple templates. But I don’t really care whether a real human being solves my problem or a template. I don’t care if a real human being tells me that I’ll get a refund or a new product or if it’s a template. All I care about is to solve my problem.
And that’s what Amazon does. They send out new packages before they even know what happened to the other package. Because what are a couple of dollars if you know andreally understand that a happy customer will come back over and over again and probably spent thousands of dollars over time.
The only thing that really matters to Amazon is a happy customer. The only thing that should matter to every other company out there, too. If your customer isn’t happy, your business is going to die over time. And the problem is that in 99.9% of the cases the ONLY time we really get in tough with most businesses is customer service.
And as we all know, customer support is one of the things that gets outsourced the fastest. Customer support is where most companies cut corners. Well, most of them don’t just cut corners. They cut entire pages. When instead they should be doubling down on customer support. Maybe even tripling down.
The only time we really interact with companies is when we have problems. In many cases this is the only time we get to interact with a real human being at that company. And in most cases the experience sucks. Maybe it’s just me. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just Germany…
And I get it. A lot of people complain about the pressure of working at Amazon. And it might be true. I’ve never worked there, so I don’t know. But at the end of the day, the only thing that really helps any business to stay in business is to make customers happy.
That’s the only way any business will be able to survive. How you get there is up to you to find out. How you find the balance between making customers and employees happy is where the magic happens.
And that’s exactly Amazon’s number one priority. To make customers happy. And if a customer isn’t happy, the employee won’t be happy either. Because the customer won’t come back to spend more. And if the customer won’t come back to spend more, the business will have to go out of business. Sooner or later. And if the business goes out of business there won’t be any jobs left either.
And that’s exactly why Amazon is crushing it. And will keep crushing it. And why others won’t be crushing it any time soon…
Originally published at yanngirard.typepad.com.
