Customer service, the most important weapon

Those who visit Amazon.com to search for a book are also shown the associated titles that customers bought. Rarely though one would expect an enterprise in the e-commerce world to also be looking at spaceflight. But that is a ‘step by step' ambition of Jeff Bezos, as Richard L. Brandt describes in One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com .

Bezos is one of a few super-rich entrepreneurs – including Sergey Brin from Google, Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, and Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic Airways – who are pursuing or funding private alternatives to NASA, Brandt notes. If ‘Blue Origin,' the space travel company of Bezos, ever turns into a real business, it could even displace Amazon in Bezos' heart and brain, the author foresees.

An ‘extraordinarily simple rule' that drives Bezos is to invent, and reinvent, tenaciously, until he gets it right. He has enormous faith in his talent for invention, informs Brandt. “Whenever we have a problem, we never accept either/or thinking. We try to figure out a solution that gets both things. You can invent your way out of any box if you believe that you can,” is a snatch of Bezos-speak.

One other rule of Bezos is, “It's always Day One,” because there are always new challenges ahead, new ideas to explore, new directions to turn, the author adds. “As with all great entrepreneurs, his job never becomes mundane or dull. He never thinks of his company as a finished product.”

Extreme example

The book opens by narrating a customer service story that Bezos heard in September 1994, two months after incorporating Amazon.com , during a course he attended to learn how to sell books. Some forty to fifty aspiring booksellers, from young people starting out to retired couples thinking about a second career, attended the four-day course, sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, and the topics included bookstore financial operations, inventory handling and so on.

One of the instructors was Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, and he had an extreme example to offer. It was about a customer who complained that she had parked her car in front of the store, and dirt from potted plants on the store's balcony had fallen her car. “So Howorth offered to wash her car for her. They climbed into her car and drove to a service station with a car wash. But the service station was closed for repairs. She became more irate. Howorth then suggested they drive to his house, where he collected a bucket, soap, and a hose and washed the car himself…”

Impressed with the story, Bezos was determined to make customer service ‘the cornerstone of Amazon.com,' as his most important weapon, the book chronicles. Amazon's customer service started with Bezos himself answering the emails, and by 1999 was manned by five hundred of ‘customer care' representatives packed into cubicles and tied to their telephones and email accounts to answer questions from customers, one learns.

The people handling these emails are generally overqualified, underpaid people with no experience in bookselling, Brandt recounts. “From the beginning, disaffected academics were popular because they were well-read and could supposedly help find books on a huge variety of topics. They were paid about $10 to $13 an hour, but with the potential of promotions and stock options dangled before their glazed eyes…”

An instructive tale for wannabe entrepreneurs.

COMMENT NOW