An Amazon employee has spoken out about the unusual email technique Jeff Bezos uses to majorly improve customer experience.
Receiving one of these ‘ticking time bomb’ emails would ‘elicit panic,’ journalist Brad Stone said in his 2013 book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.
I’d be terrified if my boss was the second richest person in the world, too.
Stone revealed that employees would be forwarded complaint emails that customers had sent directly to Bezos.
The Amazon founder would send the complaint to the relevant department who would forward it to the relevant people and so on.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 (Lionel Hahn/Getty Images)
Bezos would forward the email one with only one single note – a question mark.
Previously explaining the process at a talk at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Texas, Bezos said: “I still have an email address customers can write to. I see [the emails] and I forward them to the executives in charge of the area with a question mark. It’s shorthand. ‘Can you look into this? Why is this happening?'”
An Amazon employee has since taken to Reddit to explain their own experience with the dreaded question mark email. They also highlighted how it’s helped to majorly improve the business.
Taking to the R/ProductDesign subreddit, they explained: “About a month after I started at Amazon I got an email from my boss that was a forward of an email Jeff sent him. The email that Jeff had sent read as follows: ‘?’
Jeff Bezos reportedly has a terrifying habit at Amazon (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“That was it. Attached below the ‘?’ was an email from a customer to Jeff telling him he (the customer) takes a long time to find a certain type of screws on Amazon despite Amazon carrying the product.”
They went on to explain how a question mark email is very important and that, in this case, ‘it was astonishing to me that Jeff picked that one seemingly trivial issue and a very small category of products (screws) to personally zoom in on’.
But the email triggered the department to ‘investigate ways to help customers find unbranded and specification-driven rather than brand-driven goods more easily on Amazon,’ with product managers focused on solving the problem for the following year.
A new screen was displayed when someone searched for screws on Amazon, making it easier to find the specific type you’re looking for. It was then rolled out for other types of products.
The new screen Amazon launched in response to customer feedback (Reddit)
“Tons of data augmentation, search technology, and contextual understanding goes into this seemingly simple screen.”
They added: “Metrics and overall data are almost never enough… Our overall discovery metrics were solid. It was the anecdote that made us realize that the question of spec-driven goods is important and go look for the answer.”
Who’s to say that complaining gets us nowhere! It’s reported that Bezos’ Amazon address is simply jeff@amazon.com – so next time you’re struggling to find something on Amazon, you know what to do.