When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, it was to be a customer-centric online bookstore. My how it has grown, diversified, and prospered. A piece of this incredible story can be found in Amazon’s 2012 Letter to Shareholders, released on April 12, 2012.
Where to start?
An excellent place to begin is with Amazon’s mission statement: “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” Look at the keywords:
- Earth – not the US or developed nations but Earth and every one of us
- Customer-centric company – you know who is foremost in every employee’s hearts and minds, starting with Jeff Bezos? You and me!
- Find and discover anything – the sky is the limit when it comes to SKUs
- Online – no bricks and mortar for them
- Lowest possible prices – Kindles sold at cost, and storage prices were reduced 27 times in 7 years.
Lessons from the 2012 Shareholder’s Letter
Bezos states two ways to run the business: 1) Focus on impressing customers or 2) Focus on beating the competition. Amazon chose the first option because this helped create a proactive culture in implementing the mission. They do not worry about what the competition is doing before acting; they act if it will benefit the customers. How many other companies do you know that fixate on “impressing customers”? And isn’t impressing customers another way to deliver a superior customer experience consistently?
Here are two examples:
“We build automated systems that look for occasions when we’ve provided a customer experience that isn’t up to our standards, and those systems then proactively refund customers.”
With most companies, we have to call and complain when we have a poor experience, and the call center person may apologize, and that’s it; so we then ask to speak to a supervisor, etc., until a manager finally acknowledges their error and offers minimal compensation. Amazon’s all-powerful computer system, with extensive data mining capabilities, constantly searches for disappointments and issues a credit even before you are aware of the frustration. And it alerts someone who can prevent the problem from reoccurring, who then uses problem-solving techniques to develop and implement real corrective action.
“When you pre-order something from Amazon, we guarantee you the lowest price offered by us between your order time and the end of the day of the release date.”
Their approach is to order something when you hear about it, knowing that you will pay the offered price or less if Amazon’s price is reduced before shipment. No hassle, no worry, just peace of mind and trust that we will not be ripped off!
Speaking of trust, seven years ago, Amazon launched Amazon Web Service (AWS) to leverage its vast and growing data center infrastructure and expertise. It is now one of the leading storage center businesses in the world. Here is a direct quote from the 2012 letter:
“AWS Trusted Advisor monitors customer configurations, compares them to known best practices, and then notifies customers where opportunities exist to improve performance, enhance security, or save money. Yes, we are actively telling customers they’re paying us more than they need to. In the last 90 days, customers have saved millions of dollars through Trusted Advisor, and the service is only getting started.”
A few years ago, my car had a non-safety but annoying defect, and the only way I learned about the free upgrade available was to do an extensive web search – what a difference!
Zappos
In July 2009, Amazon purchased Zappos, an online shoe and apparel company with a unique culture that seems to go beyond Amazon. Here are three paragraphs from a Zappos CEO letter to all employees announcing the deal:
“Several months ago, they reached out to us and said they wanted to join forces with us so that we could accelerate the growth of our business, our brand, and our culture. When they said they wanted us to continue to build the Zappos brand (as opposed to folding us into Amazon), we decided it was worth exploring what a partnership would look like.
We learned that they truly wanted us to continue to build the Zappos brand and continue to build the Zappos culture in our own unique way. I think “unique” was their way of saying “fun and a little weird.”
Over the past several months, as we got to know each other better, both sides became increasingly excited about the possibilities for leveraging each other’s strengths. We realized that we are both very customer-focused companies — we focus on different ways of making our customers happy.”
This is almost saying that Amazon wanted to reinvigorate its customer-centric culture and learn how to add a sizeable dose of employee-centricity to itself. What a powerful message to send to customers and employees!
And this is what you can do in your business if you have the passion!
Good luck and be brave!
About Middlesex Consulting
Middlesex Consulting is an experienced team of professionals with the primary goal of helping capital equipment companies create more value for their clients and stakeholders. Middlesex Consulting continues to provide superior solutions to meet the needs of its clients by focusing on our strengths in Services, Manufacturing, Customer Experience, and Engineering. If you want to learn more about how we can help your organization become more customer-centric, please contact us or check out some of our free articles and white papers here.