What Amazon Can Teach Ecommerce Store Owners About Customer Service

As the world‘s largest online retailer, Amazon has consistently set the standard for ecommerce excellence. But what truly sets Amazon apart is not just its massive selection or competitive prices – it‘s the company‘s obsessive focus on providing the best possible customer experience.

In fact, Amazon‘s mission statement is "to be Earth‘s most customer-centric company." This north star has guided Amazon to develop customer service practices that have enabled it to build unrivaled trust and loyalty with hundreds of millions of customers worldwide.

By examining what Amazon does differently, other online retailers can find inspiration and tactical lessons for taking their own service to the next level. In this deep dive, we‘ll unpack the key elements of Amazon‘s customer service playbook and provide a roadmap for how to apply them in your ecommerce business.

Amazon‘s Customer Service By The Numbers

Before diving into Amazon‘s specific practices, it‘s worth underscoring just how well the company performs on customer service KPIs. Let‘s look at some of the data that quantifies Amazon‘s service excellence:

• 89% of Amazon customers are satisfied with their experience, compared to just 65% for the average retailer (source)
• Amazon‘s Net Promoter Score, a measure of customer loyalty, is 62. The average for retail is 35. (source)
• 73% of Amazon customers say customer service is a major reason they shop with the company (source)
• Amazon‘s first contact resolution rate is 92%, far above the 70% industry average (source)

Metric	Amazon	Industry Average
CSAT	89%	65%
NPS	62	35
FCR	92%	70%
Cust Service as Purchase Factor	73%	58%

Sources: ACSI, FitSmallBusiness, Statista, Stella Connect

These impressive benchmarks are the result of deliberate choices Amazon has made to prioritize the customer at every touchpoint. Next we‘ll examine the principles and practices that produce these loyalty-building results.

The 6 Pillars of Amazon‘s Customer Service Philosophy

Amazon‘s customer service success is grounded in six core tenets that shape the company‘s decisions, processes, and culture:

1. Customer obsession rather than competitor focus

Amazon maintains an external rather than an internal focus. While aware of competitors, the company focuses its energy on understanding and serving its customers‘ needs rather than simply reacting to rival retailers.

"We‘re not competitor obsessed, we‘re customer obsessed. We start with the customer and work backwards." – Jeff Bezos

This attitude permeates every function at Amazon. Employees are trained to consider how each action ultimately impacts end customers. Leaders reinforce customer-centric thinking by instituting practices like:

• Requiring staff to attend call center training to hear customer feedback firsthand
• Bringing an empty chair to meetings to represent the customer‘s presence
• Making service metrics like CSAT and defect rates key performance indicators

2. Continuous innovation on behalf of customers

Amazon never rests on its laurels. Even when the company is doing well, there is a constant push to find new ways to enhance value for customers.

Programs like Amazon Prime, frustration-free packaging, and free release date delivery on pre-orders are some of many customer experience innovations the company has spearheaded. Features like 1-Click ordering, personalized recommendations, Alexa voice shopping, and AR product previews also demonstrate Amazon‘s drive to harness technology to make buying easier.

The company encourages a "bias for action" among employees, empowering them to experiment with new ideas. Amazon then rigorously measures the impact to determine what innovations to scale – always with the customer at the center.

3. Start with the desired customer experience and work backwards

Rather than looking inward at existing capabilities, Amazon starts by envisioning what an ideal customer journey would look like and challenging itself to deliver that vision.

For example, when concepting Prime, Amazon didn‘t ask how to improve its standard multi-day shipping. It asked how it could reliably get orders to customers overnight. Constraints like cost and logistics came later. By working backwards from a delightful, pie-in-the-sky experience, Amazon pushed itself to develop new muscles.

"The best customer service is if the customer doesn‘t need to call you, doesn‘t need to talk to you. It just works." – Jeff Bezos

This philosophy extends to troubleshooting customer issues. Rather than optimizing the process of resolving problems, Amazon looks to eliminate the need for customer contacts entirely through intuitive UX, proactive communication, and robust self-service resources.

4. Resist proxies and get to the real root issues

It‘s easy to rely on proxies like surveys, focus groups, and analyst reports to gauge the customer experience. But these can miss important nuances and ground truth. Amazon‘s leaders, including Jeff Bezos, are known for diving deep into customer feedback.

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right." – Jeff Bezos

Bezos reads customer complaints and forwards them to relevant teams with a single character: "?" This sends a clear message that customer feedback must be examined thoroughly and root causes addressed. It also signals that simple, band-aid solutions are not sufficient.

By getting close to customers and resisting the temptation to smooth over issues, Amazon can identify and resolve core experience problems that metrics might not surface.

5. Make service personal and proactively human

With hundreds of millions of customers, it would be easy for Amazon to default to scripted, robotic service in the name of consistency. But the company recognizes that the most memorable and loyalty-building service moments are deeply personal.

Amazon empowers its 50,000+ customer service reps to be proactively human. The goal is not to rigidly adhere to policies, but to authentically connect with customers and creatively solve their problems. Some tactics that support this:

• Minimally scripted interactions focused on listening and personalizing
• Encouraging reps to express empathy and mirror the customer‘s tone
• Surprising customers with unexpected gestures like birthday cards or flowers after the loss of a loved one
• Enabling reps to make judgment calls including bending policies in the customer‘s favor
• Authorizing reps to follow up with customers unsolicited to provide updates

By making service interactions personal and allowing front-line staff to be proactively helpful, Amazon ensures customers feel supported and valued at an individual level.

6. Leverage technology to scale high-quality service

With its roots as a tech company, it‘s no surprise that Amazon harnesses cutting-edge tools to make its customer experience more efficient and effective. But importantly, Amazon uses technology to enhance the human element of service, not replace it.

Some key ways Amazon scales great service through tech include:

• Using AI to route contacts to the best skilled agent and surface relevant customer history
• Offering 24/7 support through a wide range of channels including email, chat, phone, social media, Alexa voice, and in-app messaging
• Providing detailed online help content, how-to videos, and discussion forums to enable self-service
• Monitoring social sentiment and review analytics to proactively identify and resolve emerging customer issues
• Deploying chatbots to handle simple, repeatable requests while seamlessly escalating to human agents when needed

By offloading routine tasks through automation, Amazon frees up service reps to focus on higher-touch interactions. Technology enables Amazon to respond faster and more effectively to customers without sacrificing the personal touch.

Applying Amazon‘s Service Playbook To Your Ecommerce Business

While Amazon‘s customer base and resources may dwarf those of smaller online retailers, the principles behind its service success remain relevant and adaptable. Here are some ways any ecommerce business can apply Amazon‘s service playbook:

Cultivate customer-centric decision making

Make considering the customer‘s perspective a habit. Some ways to embed this in your culture:

• Feature customer feedback, comments, and reviews prominently in team meetings and internal comms
• Make customer metrics like NPS and CSAT key business health indicators
• Require employees to regularly listen to customer contacts or do customer support rotations
• Recognize and reward customer-first actions by employees
• Encourage teams to consider the downstream customer impact of upstream decisions

Prioritize and act on customer pain points

Don‘t just collect feedback – do something with it. Regularly analyze customer comments, complaints, and reviews to identify core friction points. Some effective approaches:

• Route incoming feedback to relevant teams for review and identification of root causes
• Host regular cross-functional "insight sessions" to discuss customer verbatims and brainstorm solutions
• Track common reasons for contact and implement self-service resources to proactively address them
• Add visibility of top customer pain points to product roadmaps and improvement backlogs
• Close the loop with customers on how their feedback helped improve the experience

Empower service teams to be proactively helpful

Give your customer service reps the training, tools, and authority to provide memorable support. Best practices include:

• Minimizing scripts and empowering reps to personalize interactions
• Training on active listening, empathy, and creative problem-solving techniques
• Providing robust knowledge bases and AI-powered suggestions to help reps quickly access relevant info
• Allowing reps to "break the rules" within guidelines to delight customers
• Recognizing and rewarding reps for moments of customer wow
• Soliciting rep feedback on how to improve the customer experience
• Enabling reps to provide surprise reciprocity through small gestures and gift cards

Reduce customer effort at every touchpoint

Look for ways to simplify and streamline the buyer journey. Tactics to consider:

• Enabling guest checkout and one-page checkout to speed transactions
• Offering a variety of fast, free shipping methods
• Providing instant order confirmations and self-service order management
• Streamlining the return process with printable labels and refunds upon receipt scanning
• Using chatbots for 24/7 answers to routine questions with seamless escalation paths
• Personalizing the web and email experience based on past browsing and purchases
• Proactively communicating delays or issues and providing an effortless resolution path

While implementing all of these strategies at Amazon‘s scale may not be realistic, forward-thinking retailers can progressively chip away at experience improvements. Even small enhancements can have an outsized effect on customer loyalty over time.

The Bottom Line

Amazon has proven that customer service is not a cost center, but a powerful growth engine. By obsessing over customers and working backwards from their needs, Amazon has built an enviable flywheel of loyalty and advocacy.

While daunting, Amazon‘s service excellence should inspire rather than intimidate other online retailers. By studying Amazon‘s playbook and adapting its principles, any ecommerce business can progressively raise its service game.

Putting customers first is not just about good PR – it‘s good business. In ecommerce‘s increasingly competitive landscape, providing a best-in-class service experience is becoming table stakes. Fortunately, Amazon has provided a roadmap for success. It‘s up to you to follow it.