An Amazon worker has shared insights into a unique email strategy employed by Jeff Bezos to significantly enhance customer service.
Receiving one of these ‘ticking time bomb’ emails would ‘elicit panic,’ according to journalist Brad Stone in his 2013 book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.”
Facing such a situation could indeed be daunting, especially if your boss is one of the world’s wealthiest individuals.
Stone disclosed that Bezos would forward customer complaint emails directly to the concerned department, which would then pass it along to the appropriate personnel.
Bezos would attach only a single character to the email—a question mark.
During a discussion at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Texas, Bezos elaborated: “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 later shared their experience with these question mark emails on Reddit, noting how it has significantly benefitted the company.
Posting on the R/ProductDesign subreddit, they recounted: “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: ‘?’
“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.”
The employee described the impact of such emails, noting their surprise at Bezos focusing on what seemed like a minor issue involving a specific category of products—screws.
This email prompted the department to explore ways to assist customers in finding non-branded, specification-based items more efficiently on Amazon, with product managers dedicating the next year to addressing the issue.
A new interface was introduced for screw searches on Amazon, simplifying the process of locating specific types. This was later expanded to other product categories.
“Tons of data augmentation, search technology, and contextual understanding goes into this seemingly simple screen,” they said.
They concluded by stating: “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.”
This scenario highlights the power of feedback. It’s believed that Bezos’ Amazon email is [email protected]—so if you’re having trouble locating something on Amazon, there’s a direct line to the top.