The Amazon Customer Experience: How to Improve It
Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world. It is the retailer to which most consumers turn to when they wish to make a purchase, particularly if the consumer has Amazon Prime, which offers free, two-day shipping on many goods. This might lead most consumers to assume that Amazon customer service is superior to any and all alternatives. However, like all large companies, Amazon has had issues arises with its customer experience. Overall, Amazon has earned very positive reviews in terms of its customer relationships, but there is always room for improvement and Amazon strives to set a higher and higher bar for itself, not merely surpass its competitors. In fact, according to Coleman (2018), Amazon calls itself the most customer-centric company on earth. This sets a very high level of expectations for consumers.
What Amazon Is Doing Right
According to CEO Jeff Bezos, he still reads customer complaints, to gain a sense of what the company is doing wrong and what it can do better (Clifford 2018). According to Bezos: “Their expectations are never static — they go up. It's human nature. We didn't ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday's 'wow' quickly becomes today's 'ordinary'” (Clifford, 2018, par.13). Bezos says that he takes both metrics and anecdotal evidence under consideration when constructing...
For example, when a PlayStation needed for a customer’s Christmas was stolen off of the porch of the customer’s home, technically this was the responsibility of UPS, not Amazon, given the shipping company had left it in a vulnerable place. Amazon sent a new toy for free of charge so the family would not be bereft at Christmas. The free publicity, Bezos noted, that Amazon received from the incident more than paid for the product (Mello, 2018). In previous eras, customers would simply tell a few friends if they had a positive or negative experience with a company. Today, customers can post reviews read by thousands of people online. Not only do consumers post reviews on Amazon; they also go to social media on Twitter and other public arenas that can be read by thousands of people. In another small but significant encounter with a consumer, when Amazon learned that the customer had incorrectly purchased AA batteries from Amazon, they offered to send the customer the needed AAA batteries at no costs, because the cost of shipping it back it would take to process the return would outweigh the value of reselling the returned merchandise (Coleman, 2018).
On a psychological level, Amazon has also overcome many customers’ resistance…
