Amazon.com Core Values: A Customer Experience Obsession
I’ve recently been reading more and more about the concept of customer experience and customer obsession. Customer service, as it has traditionally know, is on its way out. It’s the way to lose business and drive your customer base insane.
The successful organizations with massive positive online goodwill and reputation are those that have embraced, live by, and seek to innovate in the area of customer experience and creating customer delight. I say customer delight because simply focusing on customer satisfaction is like seeing to me mediocre. No one wants to just be satisfied, we all want to be wowed, to feel special, and be amazed at the quality of service we receive.
Amazon.com is one of those companies that seeks to innovate in the area of customer relations and interaction. They live by the following core values:
Customer Experience Requires Customer Obsession
We start with the customer and work backwards.
Customer Experience Requires Innovation
If you don’t listen to your customers you will fail. But if you only listen to your customers you will also fail.
Customer Experience Requires a Bias for Action
We live in a time of unheralded revolution and insurmountable opportunity – provided we make every minute count.
Customer Experience Requires Ownership
Ownership matters when you’re building a great company. Owners think long-term, plead passionately for their projects and ideas, and are empowered to respectfully challenge decisions.
Customer Experience Requires a High Hiring Bar
When making a hiring decision we ask ourselves: “Will I admire this person? Will I learn from this person? Is this person a superstar?”
Customer Experience Requires Can Be Frugal
We spend money on things that really matter and believe that frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention!
Too many times organizations settle for doing business the old fashioned way. Managing by spreadsheets, by just implementing metrics and key performance indicators for staff is counter productive to really focusing on the customer, the one who really keeps them in business. If you look at the day-to-day operations, policies, and procedures within the organization, the customer becomes an after-thought, an annoyance that needs to be discouraged from contacting the organization and is usually pushed away by the anti-customer servicing policies implemented by the organization.
Does your organization provide REAL customer service? Do you create an exceptional customer experience that keeps customers coming back? Is what you are doing for your customers really a service? At the end of the interaction, does the customer come away thinking of the value you offered them?
How often do you really take the customer experience into account when planning and developing your policies and services? In your last project or product update, did you really take the customer experience into account? Do you imagine yourself as a customer contacting your own organization? How would you feel after working with your organization? Would you buy from yourself? Would you buy again?
Making the customer experience the focus of your organization, like Amazon, will ensure that every decision you make is focused on serving the individuals who matter most to the business, the customer.
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