5 Customer Care Philosophies You Should Learn from Jeff Bezos

April 5, 2018

by Jason Grills

According to a recent study, Amazon.com tops the list of best companies for customer support chat facilities! Million of customers are satisfied with Amazon’s support team. Well, this has been the scenario for decades.

If you are a budding business whose sales figures depend on the “quick” decisions made by customers, you need the right live chat software and advice from the expert: Jeff Bezos.

The CEO’s Words

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, is definitely much more than a traditional leader. His business philosophies are quite different but extremely powerful. At all times, Bezos ensures that customers are taken care off. All his ideas are on how to improve customer satisfaction. He thinks that it’s possible by putting yourself in the shoes of your customers. Though his ventures sink deep into the digital era, he doesn’t forget the primary stakeholder: Customers.

Today, Jeff Bezos heads a successful company based on these philosophies. All the departments in Amazon are backed by priceless customer care. With more than 160 million active customers, Bezos is the architect behind Amazon’s customer care team.

So, how does Jeff Bezos plan? What are his philosophies on customer care? What makes Amazon the world’s best customer-centric and authentic firm?

Keep reading to know more.

Lessons to be Learned From Jeff Bezos

1. Listen and Understand

Jeff Bezos strongly believe that everyone in Amazon must be capable of working in a call center. Whether you are a chief technology officer or a manager, you must be a part of the company’s call-center training programs. These training sessions are organized on an annual basis. During the call-center training programs, you will be able to see Jeff Bezos and all his leaders. Some claim that Jeff Bezos borrowed this doctrine from the Marines. At the marines, everyone should be trained to become a talented rifleman. Only then, field-specific training is offered.

What is important here would be Amazon’s primary philosophy: listening. It is important for any Amazon employee to listen to its customers. Above all, they must listen to understand what the customer wants. It is pretty simple to hear out the other person. The challenge comes when you want to understand them. Without proper understanding, you will not be able to offer a comprehensive solution.

At all times, the cornerstone of any customer support unit would be careful listening and understanding. With careful understanding, specific problems raised by customers can be addressed easily.

2. Tackling Customer Needs

Jeff Bezos once said, “We are never competitor based or obsessed. We are always customer based and obsessed. We work in a backward workflow. We always begin with our customer needs and then build the framework”.

How did the world get its first Kindle tablet? Undeniably, it was a customer need that triggered the launch of this product. It was not the engineers or the managers. The personal preference of a customer encouraged engineers to work on Kindle. Though the Kindle took several years to be built, Bezos never flattered about it. He always believed that customers, and not the engineers, should be proud.

Finding the right hardware for the Kindle project was a million-dollar affair. Financial executives were puzzled on how much Bezos was prepared to spend on the project. Well, the CEO’s only question was “How much money do we have?”. Bezos didn’t think twice to spend on products that can fix customer needs. He strongly believes that leaders should not forget the actual wage payers: the customers. It is important to understand and work towards their needs.

When your company gathers to evaluate a service or product team, you must not focus on how to make the organization smarter and better. Instead, figure out how you can make happier customers.

3. The Most Important Person

Jeff Bezos claims that companies become resilient when they focus on customer needs.

When Amazon was going through its fledgling days, Bezos found it difficult to establish his philosophies. Most leaders were against his focus on customers. His obsession with customer satisfaction was rejected by 70% of the leaders. This was definitely an overwhelming number.

However, Bezos never backed from the concept of the “Empty Chair”. He always brought customers into his meetings.

Do you know that Bezos used to bring an empty chair into his important conferences and meetings? Along with his top executives, an empty chair was placed. This chair is for potential customers. And, Bezos identifies this chair as the most important one in the entire room.

In all meetings, the empty chair is given a different weight. And, decisions are made based on how people sitting on the empty chair would respond. Though the customer involved is invisible, they are always accounted for Amazon’s major meetings (or decisions).

A secret: You don’t need an empty chair to remember your priceless customers. Just, include them in all your meetings.

4. Never Settle

Amazon is never happy if the results are not “100%”.

In the year 2011, Bezos was proud that his company delivered his promise of getting 99.9% of all orders to his customers before the holiday season and New Year. But, Bezos was not “happy”. He sees room for change and improvement since the achievement is not 100%.

As your customer support team becomes stronger, you will be able to improve from 99.9% to 100%. This is when customer live chat software comes into the picture.

5. Respect

The talk about Jeff Bezo’s customer care philosophies will be incomplete without “Respect”. At all times, the brand must pay respect to its current and future customers. If customers are unhappy, they will definitely spread the word about it to 6 people. And, if you make an online shopper unhappy, at least 6000 people will know about it.

Let’s Conclude…

Appreciate the authority of customers in this modernized and internet-based world. In addition to customer chat support, you must research through your social media networking platforms. Build a stronger relationship with customers. Respect their contribution to your brand’s success. And, if something is going wrong, fix it right away! Train your customer chat support teams on how to handle unhappy customers and bad reviews.

Making customers your top priority can help you grow as a brand and boost its reach across your target audience easily. So if you’ve been lacking the inspiration on how to improve further as an organization, then the idols like Jeff Bezos can surely help you out.

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About Carla

Carla Johnson Innovation Creativity Speaker Author

Carla Johnson helps leaders who are often paralyzed by traditional thinking. They suffer from slow growth, an eroding competitive advantage, low employee engagement, and depleted investor confidence. Their teams lack purpose and progress and constantly battle a resistance to change and new ideas.

As the world’s leading innovation architect, Carla’s spent 20 years helping leaders shatter limits and discover undiscovered possibilities. Through years of research, she’s developed a simple, scalable 5-step process that teaches people how to consistently produce inspired ideas that lead to uncommon outcomes.

Carla Johnson Innovation Creativity Speaker Author