Amazon's
mission/vision statement is as follows: "Our vision is to be earth's most
customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and
discover anything they might want to buy online." Amazon has been
successful in attaining that goal. The company currently offers a lot of
products and services, and have made acquisitions of emerging companies; these
acquisitions certainly extended their product line. Among these acquisitions
include shoe retailer Zappos and online bookstore Abebooks. The company has
also expanded to other industries. For example, Amazon is a retailer of digital
content. Amazon also introduced their own tablet, their own e-book reader,
video streaming and cloud storage. In accordance with their vision, Amazon has
constantly been expanding their line of products and services, to truly build a
platform in which anything can be purchased. Advantages of this strategy include the
growth of their global brand and
the growth of their customer base. The main disadvantage is that Amazon might
not be able to focus on all these products or services.
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Maintaining
good customer "experience" is key, even when it's an outside merchant
making the sale
This
year's list of customer service champs.
Last summer, Lisa Dias was
poking around the Amazon.com (AMZN) Web site for books that could help her
start a home business. The 45-year-old found a used workbook for would-be
entrepreneurs that sounded promising and was described as "like new."
The seller wasn't Amazon itself, but one of the merchants that market through
its Web site. Still, Dias went ahead and dished out $24.95 for the paperback.
When the book arrived at her New
Jersey home, though, it wasn't anywhere close to new. The worksheets were
already filled in with someone else's scrawling. She felt burned but didn't do
anything about it until November. She first tried the merchant and didn't get
any response. Then Dias called Amazon. The company immediately gave her a
refund, without her having to return the book. She's still a bit baffled that
Amazon paid her money the company never received in the first place. "I
felt like they stood up for me," says Dias.
For the most part, Amazon has
earned a reputation for strong service by letting customers get what they want
without ever talking to an employee. Sales clerks are nonexistent. Orders ship
with a few mouse clicks. Packages arrive on doorsteps quickly. It all happens
with monotonous regularity even as the number of customers has doubled in the
past five years to 88 million. But when things go wrong at Amazon—and they
occasionally do—the company's employees get involved. That may be where Amazon
stands out most markedly from other companies, and helps explain how the
company earned the No. 1 spot on Business Week’s customer service ranking this
year.
One recent February day in
Manhattan, Jeff Bezos, Amazon's excitable 45-year-old founder and chief
executive, sat still long enough to explain the ideas behind his company's
approach. He talked about the distinctions Amazon makes between customer
experience and customer service. The latter is only when customers deal with
Amazon employees—and Bezos wants that to be the exception rather than the rule.
"Internally, customer service is a component of customer experience,"
he says. "Customer experience includes having the lowest price, having the
fastest delivery, having it reliable enough so that you don't need to contact
[anyone]. Then you save customer service for those truly unusual situations.
You know, I got my book and it's missing pages 47 through 58," he says,
breaking into a booming laugh.
Fixing customers' problems
builds customer loyalty with people like Dias, says Bezos. But it's also a good way to
spot recurring issues that need to be addressed more systematically. Outside
merchants, like the one Dias dealt with, are a prime example. For years, Amazon
has allowed other retailers to sell through its Web site to broaden the
selection of products it offers. But these companies can be an Achilles' heel.
At eBay (EBAY), which also lets merchants sell through its site, there have
been complaints about poor service and fraud.
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