Amazon and the art of service
May I begin with a message to the Federal Trade Commission, which is demanding that bloggers now reveal if they have been paid or incentivized by a company they are reviewing?
I have not been given any money by Amazon. I have not consulted for Amazon. And the only thing that Amazon has ever given me for free is free Super Saver shipping when I clicked that very button on the checkout page.
There.
So please now let me tell you about a certain experience with the Kindle-bearing online seller.
While traveling through Europe over the last month, I decided I needed some books for my flight back to the U.S. So I ordered a couple from Amazon, the sort of tomes you can't readily get in the U.S. You know, like the seminal cultural work "Englischer Fussball" by Raphael Honigstein.
On the little Amazon form, I asked them to send the books to my friend Ed's house. Ed lives in London with his wife, Sarah, and has chickens in the back garden, two of which have recently been murdered by those SVPs of animal vileness, foxes.
While I was in Croatia, the British Royal Mail duly arrived at Ed's house with the seminal works dispatched by Amazon. Ed and Sarah were not at home, so the mailman left a note.
(Credit:
CC Aurelijus Valesa/Flickr)
On my return to London, I experienced an uncommon desire to acquaint myself with my "Englischer Fussball."
However, Ed explained that he had been to the Post Office and they had told him they had lost the package. The Royal Mail had been on strike, you see, and one supposes that a book about English soccer written by a German was all too tempting a punching bag for an aggrieved striker.
Never having really needed to contact Amazon's customer service chappies before, I wrote an e-mail, explaining the depth of my hurt and the fact that I was shortly returning to the U.S.
Four minutes later--and this was a Sunday morning--Ed wanders up to me, clutching his phone.
"It's for you," he said. Why would anyone be calling me at Ed's house? I have my own cell phone.
"Hello, it's Doug from Amazon," said the person talking through Ed's phone. Now I can't swear his name was Doug. But I can swear to the fact that he sounded just a little hung over. Did I mention this was Sunday morning?
Still, it was like talking to someone you'd met the previous night at the local pub. I told him when I was leaving for the U.S. There was no time for Amazon to resend my order and get it to me in the U.K. So "Doug" suggested they immediately send a re-order to my U.S. address, so that the books could at least be there on my arrival.
This was all so stunningly reasonable, efficient, and customer-oriented that I couldn't believe it was happening in, well, England.
In an era in which so many companies are trying to get their customers to do all of their work, so that they can charge those customers for their own time, there was something quaintly heartening about an online seller reacting so swiftly and with such plain sense.
On this evidence (and I accept that some people may have had bad experiences with Amazon, such as those who ordered an interesting edition of "1984"), Amazon might be able to teach certain companies about treating people well.
The first "certain company" that comes to my mind is the cell phone provider who, when I canceled my contract and told them their handsets were as putrid as a raccoon's breakfast and their customer service resembled that of a Minsk hardware store circa 1973, said to me: "Oh, OK. Well, would you like to pass your phone service on to a friend?"
Chris Matyszczyk is an award-winning creative director who advises major corporations on content creation and marketing. He brings an irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes ironic voice to the tech world. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
ROFL..LMAO.......ok...ok....c'mon stop it please.....I am gonna have a leak.....
If by "expensive" you mean not free, then you can say that about any company.
Oh, and sod off with your patronising attitude towards the UK.
Chris is always at a disadvantage on Cnet because of having a sense of humour, which seems to be a disadvantage among techies. Pity.
At the same time, I predict that someday the board of directors will decide they can improve shareholder value by cutting out customer service spending, which will give them the short-term benefit but long-term will turn them into the K-Mart of the Internet (wait, Buy.com is already the K-mart of the Internet...).
Moral of the story: While I wish they would have told me to begin with that the book was on special order, I can't remember the last time I've been treated that well by any retail establishment, online or off. Amazon has my business now and in the future.
- by jwagdy October 7, 2009 12:42 AM PDT
- To the writer,
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(19 Comments)I share your view on Amazon. In December 2004 i had a similar experience to yours. I ordered a couple of movies to be shipped to me in Egypt. I used normal mail which was supposed to take max 2 weeks for the movies to arrive.
The movies never arrived, and I wrote Amazon customer support an email regarding the incident. They replied a couple of hours later, and apologized for the missing items and the delay in response.
They offered me either to reship the missing items or refund the cost to my credit card. I replied and asked them to re-ship the same movies again to me. They did using DHL and I got the movies 4 days later, with no cost on my side.
Amazon has an excellent customer service.