Amazon 1st Principle: Customer Obsession

The first Leadership Principle of the Amazon Way is:

Customer Obsession
Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Here, the key is not being customer focused. Here, the interesting word is obsession. To obsess means to think very deeply about it, to never let it out of your thinking, and to use it as the constant cornerstone of approach. Most companies don’t truly obsess about anything—they think about it, they may even act on it, but they are not obsessed.

Early on Bezos brought an empty chair into meetings so lieutenants would be forced to think about the crucial participant who wasn’t in the room: the customer. Now that ­surrogate’s role is played by specially trained employees, dubbed “Customer Experience Bar Raisers.” When they frown, vice ­presidents tremble.

When asked what competitors he worries about, Jeff Bezos replied that Amazon decided early on that it would be “competitor alert, but not competitor obsessed,” Instead, his company is customer obsessed. “Companies can choose which they want to be. I think both models can be successful”.

“The best customer service means the customer doesn’t need to call you,” Bezos says, noting the most common complaint from Amazon shoppers is, “Where’s my stuff?” To that end, Amazon measures success in customer-contacts-per-units sold. “We endeavor to drive that down every year, and the way we’re driving that down is by delivering [people’s] stuff.”

Summing-up: That fixation on customer service appears to have paid off, Bezos says: The company has some of the highest customer service ratings in the retail industry.

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6 Comments

  1. Saquib Ejaz

    It’s not only making profit it’s consist and fulfill the social responsibility. Thank for your great contributions

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  4. Hameed Mirza

    Each customer has a different idea about how things work but the bottom line is their satisfaction at the time of delivery. We need to explore all of those ideas.

  5. Cameron Clark

    Great concept here. Customer obsession is critical for sustainability and longevity. Not only can obsessing over the competition result in waste and distraction, but it can divert attention away from what keeps customers. Customers are the component in the life cycle that determine survival- if the customer is not happy, they will look for an alternative, in other words, a competitor. Even if a competitor does not currently exist, one may be born out of the attrition of customers from your organization to theirs. If a competitor succeeds, it means that we may be failing at something.

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