By Jack Cumming
Maybe “cheat” is too strong here. “Cheat” implies intention, and Amazon may just be clueless. “Bamboozle” is another word that comes to mind. I would guess that Amazon just looks at transactions through its corporate lens, and that lens filters out the customer perspective. That filter is an ever-present temptation in a corporate ivory tower. But, back to the realities.
Amazon is now under new management, and it shows. The cheating may be unintentional, but the effect is the same. A recent example reveals the soft underbelly that a mindless pursuit of profit can expose. While Jeff Bezos was the undisputed laird of Amazon, there was an obsession about customers. After all, customers pay all the bills, including shareholder rewards.
A Simple Error
Jeff Bezos famously had a conspicuously empty chair in all meetings to represent the absent consumer, so that decision teams and strategic thinkers would always have that truth about who pays the bills squarely in mind. Anyone who had an issue with Amazon in that era knew that Amazon would instantly and effortlessly make it right. That was the case whether the issue was justified or was fully attributable to the consumer.
That’s no longer true as the following example reveals. Recently, we had a young college student visiting us. She had never seen the frivolous movie Clueless, so we thought that would be fun. We went to Amazon Prime Video and “bought” the movie for $6.99. “Buying” a movie with Prime means a license to stream the movie at any time for as many times as you wish. We were fine with that, and the price was very reasonable.
Later, we all gathered at the end of the day and settled in to stream the movie. Guess what. Amazon didn’t support our purchase, and they made us buy it again for another $6.99. It’s likely a software glitch and easily correctable. But not so fast. That’s not the new Amazon under new leadership.
Not So Fast
Naturally, I went online, figuring it would be easy and hassle-free to correct. That’s no longer the case. First, Amazon now assumes your problem is due to your stupidity, so you are channeled through their “help” protocols. Time is wasting.
Second, they offer a phone number or chat as a corrective path. Who has time for phone and chat, and why would Amazon think that was cost-efficient? Amazon must follow the old, senseless custom of paying supervisors more the more people they have working for them. Absurd.
You may be thinking that chat can be instant, and it can if you’re lucky. For it to be instant, though, Amazon has to staff for the highest peak the chat center ever encounters. Even then, the customer has to wait to be recognized, type in the problem on the fly, and stand by waiting for a response.
It’s Not Complicated
The obvious alternative is email or other problem posting option, e.g., a contact form. In that case, the customer’s time isn’t wasted, and the same “chat” team can resolve the snags during their downtime, thereby optimizing workload management. This is so obvious that one wonders why Amazon makes it complicated.
Probing further in quest of such a simple email capability revealed a statement that “Amazon prefers phone and chat.” How arrogant! Amazon prefers to inconvenience the customer so that corporate is not inconvenienced. Remember this is all about a mere $6.99, but by now the injustice of Amazon’s lack of integrity was beginning to grate.
A search of Google revealed a customer service email address for Amazon. It was logically [email protected]. It seemed like some vestige of customer care might persist at Amazon. How wrong could one be? Answer: very wrong. This is not Jeff Bezos’s Amazon. This is a new self-absorbed, self-serving Goliath that cares not a whit for anything other than itself. Whatever happened to Bezos’s value-driven, creative leadership?
The Customer Is Nobody
The Amazon response came from [email protected]. It was intended to put customers in their place. It begins by addressing the customers as “nobody.” Obviously, Amazon’s new attitude is that we customers should be grateful that the Great Amazon deigns to let us do business with them. “You’ve written to an address that does not accept incoming direct e-mails, but we have provided links to help answer some common questions.” This was followed by responses indicating that the “the customer is always wrong” and is also too dumb to just get things right. Evidently, Amazon’s leaders believe Amazon to be infallible.
With that, the obvious decision was to just let Amazon keep the $6.99. It’s just not worth it. The damage to Amazon’s reputation is far greater than the ill-gotten $6.99 that the behemoth now gets to keep. This is cheating by making it so difficult for customers to make a wrong right, that the wrong accrues to the cheater’s benefit. One wonders why the Amazon board allows such incompetence at the top to gravitate down to the rank-and-file who are trying to please the whims of the leaders.
To hell with the customers. The C-suite rules. Oh, yes, did I mention that Amazon now pushes ads to the Echo Show that was bought ad-free. The C-suite seems to lack the imagination to monetize its dominance of voice-recognizing devices beyond the simplistic notion of pushing out ads.
Sometimes a CEO fails to realize how simplified a message can become as it is received and internalized by the rank-and-file. It’s only natural for a CEO to believe that everyone understands the nuances the CEO takes for granted. With Jeff Bezos, complexity boiled down to, “Please customers.” For other CEOs the message may become just, “Make money.”
Lesson for Senior Living
Now let’s turn to senior living. Here’s an industry that is just beginning to learn to value its customers, who are residents, their families, and the localities in which communities are ensconced. The best example of the misguided penury of a misbegotten $6.99 comes in the food service aspect of senior living, though there are other examples as well.
Where I live, we once had a popular dining manager named Tom Shannon, who now hosts the Speckled Hen Inn near Madison, Wisconsin. His watchword concerning residents was, “Give them what they want,” and he imbued that service consciousness into the attitudes of his staff. The rationale was that most residents are good people who won’t abuse generosity.
Even if what a resident asks for what seems unreasonable to the dining manager who puts money first, it most likely reflects an honest expectation by the resident based on something learned or taken for granted along the way. Better to please residents than to sully the reputation of the community with something that may be perceived as an injustice.
You or Us
The alternative is to give loyalty to the enterprise. The managerial imperative then becomes to prevent anyone, no matter how innocent, from taking advantage of the enterprise in any way. It reverses the common adage from “the customer is always right,” a formulation to create brand loyalty, to “the enterprise is always right,” a stance that leads to brand mistrust.
Senior living struggles with trust issues, as is evident in any reading of how the industry has recently been portrayed by the independent media (as opposed to the public relations media). The industry should learn from Amazon and do everything possible, including being generous in customer relationships, to demonstrate that it is primarily a trust purveyor which offers living and care benefits customers can rely on.
