When I joined Amazon in 1999, it was growing so fast that every holiday season we faced the same problem: not enough people to pack boxes or answer customer calls. So, year after year, we sent our corporate employees into the trenches.
I spent one Christmas working the night shift at our fulfillment center in Fernley, Nevada. Another year, I was in Campbellsville, Kentucky, doing the same. We weren’t there for a photo op or for some short-lived exchange program; we were actually picking, packing, and shipping orders.
At the time, this was a necessity. We didn’t have enough labor. But it turned into something much more valuable. I learned firsthand how our fulfillment centers operated and the problems that arose from expanding from products with relatively uniform shape, size, and weight (books, CDs, DVDs) to selling toys, TVs, and power tools. I saw how hard it is to work on the frontline when your company is growing like crazy and hasn’t had time to build the right tools, processes, and systems. Seemingly simple ideas and changes conceived in corporate HQ can create a mess for the folks working in Fulfillment Centers and our customers. All of the problems flow downstream.
After a few years, as we scaled up, we no longer needed to pull people out of headquarters to meet holiday demand. Our capacity to handle the holiday rush increased, but the value of that hands-on exposure was too great to abandon.
So, Amazon turned it into a formal program called “Customer Connection” (C2).
Under C2, every Amazonian was expected to spend time each year working alongside our customer service and fulfillment teams, regardless of their title. This was often more of a shadowing or immersion experience, but the goal was clear: getting closer to frontline operations and the customer experience.
The point of continuing to do this after it was operationally necessary was to increase operational understanding. By experiencing the work hands-on, you might discover that a product your team built was adding friction, or that a policy created in Seattle made life harder in Shakopee, Minnesota. The point was to see things you would never see from behind your desk.
C2 is yet another example of the mechanisms Amazon has created to reinforce the Leadership Principle, Customer Obsession.
