At Amazon, we implemented an “Andon Cord” system that allows any customer support member to disable the buy button on an item that results in a poor customer experience. This was inspired by Toyota’s Quality Management practices. It worked like this:
Toyota has a physical cord on the production line that any worker could pull to stop the line if they noticed a defect in a car. The line would not restart until the plant management identifies and fixes the root cause. The message and the mechanism are clear— everyone is responsible for maintaining a high bar for quality, and quality is more important than meeting volume goals.
At Amazon, we took that idea and applied it to the retail customer experience.
Instead of a physical cord on a physical assembly line, we empowered our customer support agents to “pull the cord” on any product. This would disable the buy button, making it unavailable for sale. If an agent noticed a pattern (such as multiple customers complaining about the same product defect), they could unilaterally remove that product from sale until the issue was resolved.
This is a big deal. Consider granting the most junior employees the authority to remove an item from the website. This is a big responsibility, but just like the Toyota Andon Cord, it puts real teeth behind the concepts of customer-obsession and quality.
This process is not a secret at Toyota or Amazon. According to Google, 3M, Caterpillar, and Honeywell have similar processes. Perhaps there are more, but I don’t know of many companies that have put in place a process like this one.
The most likely reason that so few companies have an Andon cord system is that they prioritize sales over quality. When you stop the line or stop selling something, you’re interrupting your revenue stream. This inflicts near-term pain on the organization and its outputs.
But in the long term, the process improves input metrics related to customer quality, such as defect rates, customer returns, and support resolution times. Humans are biased towards near-term satisfaction, so you have to create mechanisms to offset this.
Does your company have a process like an Andon Cord? Or, can you think of one or more systems in your company where you should have an Andon Cord? Share your experiences in the comments section.
