In order to make his employees uncomfortable, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, once called his own customer service number during a meeting.
Customer satisfaction has always been the company’s first priority, as evidenced by stories we’ve heard about the past CEO who always brought an extra chair to meetings to represent the customer.
Bezos believes that the consumer is king, and it is this belief that has helped Amazon grow to a company worth over $2 trillion.
You understand.
Bezos exposed several of his senior employees during a meeting after they had betrayed his principles and misled customers by saying that anyone with problems may speak with a call handler in under one minute.
Due to the overwhelming volume of complaints they had received, the now-billionaire had unquestionable proof that this was not the case.
Speaking on the Lex Fridman Podcast in December 2023, he recounted how he used the ruse to make his point to his employees, one of whom attempted to fool him into thinking that everything was well with the company’s customer care department.
“I have a saying which is: when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right,” Bezos explained. “It doesn’t mean you just slavishly follow the anecdotes then, it means you go examine the data.”
“It’s usually not that the data is being miss-collected, it’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing.”