Jeff Bezos spent significant time reading customer emails. If he read about an issue with your product, he would forward you the email with a simple “?”. I received at least one of these every week during my 10 years as VP of Amazon Music and Prime Video.
There are two amazing things about this practice:
First, you couldn’t just respond with “we’ll look into it.” That wasn’t acceptable. In general, you were expected to respond within 24 hours with a diagnosis of the problem and a plan to fix it. That meant pulling logs, researching the customer’s issue in detail, and identifying the root causes and remedies.
Second, consider how much time the CEO of Amazon spent reading (the angry) emails from customers describing bad experiences at Amazon. For every email I received, he would send another 20 to my peers. He dedicated a significant portion of his week to reading customer emails, selecting those to forward, and then critically reviewing his team’s responses.
Some people see this practice as disruptive. They say that Jeff was randomizing the org by dropping in these unexpected, urgent tickets. I don’t see it that way.
The way I see it, it kept us sharp. It was a forcing function to continuously obsess over customers and dive deep into the nuances of customer experience — the corner cases and edge cases.
CXO and VP leaders — how many hours are you spending each week reading customer emails and managing the gritty, messy details of the customers’ experience for your products and services?
