Jeff Bezos is on the line

If you call Amazon’s customer service, there’s a small chance you’ll reach Jeff Bezos himself. Bezos and his team of executives spend time with the customer service center every year.

Why?

Because Bezos is obsessed with customer experience. 

Here’s Bezos explaining Amazon’s not-so-secret weapon way back in 1999: 

“If there's one thing Amazon.com is about, it's obsessive attention to the customer experience, end-to-end.”

What do we know about people who leave negative reviews? Are they simply mean and vicious people? Not necessarily. Aside from the handful of people who complain about the quality of a restaurant’s ice or the trolls who gripe that the Great Wall of China is not that great, most customers are well-meaning people with legitimate complaints.

Yet, we often hear that only disgruntled customers bother to leave reviews, hence why there are so many negative reviews. But, this doesn’t explain the full picture.

Consider the other side of this coin. Only about 10% of customers actually make the effort to provide feedback. So what about the other 90%? What do they really think? We may never know. These customers simply end up telling friends and family about their negative experience. Not only do they stop engaging with your brand, they make sure 10 other people stop engaging with your brand. The 90% can sink a brand.

You don’t know what you don’t know. So, what can you do?

A philosophical remedy would be to adopt a Bezos-like obsession with customer experience. In practical terms, consider a tool like the Net Promoter Score.

NPS is a survey that asks a simple question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [Insert Your Brand Name] to other people?*

Scores of 9-10 signal Promoters. Anything between 7 and 8 is a Passive. And scores of 6 and below are Detractors.

This should give you a clear picture of how customers perceive your brand, as you work toward building a customer base of 9s and 10s.

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*This is also a great way to gauge the quality of your products and services. The objective is to get as close to 9s and 10s as possible, enhance 7s and 8s, and discard 6s and below.