Customer Service Amazon Style

The best advertising is a happy customer and having a good system in place to ensure a great customer experience from the start of your sales cycle is priceless. Word-of-mouth advertising gained by presenting a satisfying buying experience from the initial contact through the final sales process is a powerful force for your business success. Having a consistent and harmonious customer service system in place that allows you to appear to your customers and prospective customers that you do not need a customer service department makes for these win-win relationships. This was one of the lessons learned in building the ecommerce giant Amazon as shared by former Amazon executive John Rossman in his book The Amazon Way.

Gleaning ideas from case studies like these require you to skim through the fluff to get at the heart of the ideals being presented. If you read this book for your own business enlightenment, learn what you can from these examples and apply the things that you think are good for your success. Most of these ideas that Amazon integrated into their company philosophies will be good to emulate, with some possible exceptions. The four customer service secrets gleaned form Mr. Rossman’s book, which can be downloaded for Kindle here: The Amazon Way: Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles are:

1. The best customer service is no customer service.
   • You have developed your company’s workflow, policies, and systems for smooth operations thereby preventing problems from ever happening before, during, and after the sale. Contingency plans for when something does go wrong. Preventing “Putting out fires” by creating and maintaining a well developed operational systems in place and innovating solutions when a new problem is identified.
2. Your customer is someone’s mom. Treat them that way.
   • This one really is a no-brainer but it deserves repeating, treat your customers well. Respect, kindness, and listening skills go a long way in presenting an adept customer experience.
3. Work backward from the customer.
   • This is a critical marketing idea for all small business owners to address. Developing your business model means answering the question, “What problem do your customers have?” that you can provide an exceptional solution for them to choose over your competition? Identifying the problem that you help your customer solve takes their perspective into account when developing your sales strategies.
4. Invent and simplify.
   • Amazon is a disrupter of the status quo by being open to innovate against the current of naysayers. What can you do to make your customers life better through your services or product offerings? Can you buck the trend and stand out as a solutions innovator?

When thinking about customer service, know that what you put into getting it right and always striving to do better will go a long way towards you accomplishing your business success goals. Learn from the best, and always learn more.