Alexa, WTF Happened?
Amazon's culture of customer obsession swallowed by profit motive
For a few weeks in 2020, my life was more or less defined by piss.
An Amazon customer had ordered a water bottle, which had been shipped from the London warehouse where I was a senior manager.
To her complete horror, she’d pried open her parcel to find a designer sports bottle half filled with non-designer urine.
I’ll spare you the photos, but let’s just say no scientific process was required to conclude the awful truth. On this occasion, we had not delivered a smile.
Investigation determined a lone miscreant in our warehouse was the culprit. For reasons unknown, he’d decided to foist his frustration upon a hapless stranger in a most undignified manner. Warehouse workers don’t know the identities of customers they serve, so this lunatic had committed a totally random act of vulgarity.
Key safeguards had failed.
Prior to being sorted for shipping, every parcel is weighed by an automated scale. If measured weight differs from expected weight, the parcel is kicked out of the flow and manually checked.
Except in this case, the employee who was supposed to do the manual check overrode the system and stuck the parcel back on the conveyor without checking it, unwittingly shuttling several ounces of liquid mayhem downstream. They’d felt pressure to do so because otherwise the belts were stopping, backing up the whole operation.
When this came to my attention, my team and I went to work addressing the causes.
I was responsible. This could never happen again.
We re-trained not just the one kickout employee but all hundred-plus kickout operators. We double-checked the calibration of the scales even though they had worked in this case.
We worked to control volume on shipping conveyors to reduce pressure on the operators. We addressed pack quality with several hundred packers to reduce frivolous kickouts.
And of course, we engaged with our teams to satisfy ourselves that the misconduct in this case was evidence of a lone, pissed off renegade and didn’t reflect broader disquiet. We also made certain this hadn’t been an act of toilet-starved desperation.
We did many other things, responding with unreasonably appropriate disproportionality to protect the customer experience.
But while we could prevent it happening again, we couldn’t prevent it from becoming a national story. Because Amazon’s initial response to the customer had been so piss poor that she chose to vent her understandable shock in popular media.
Having received a container of human waste, and having paid for the privilege, she’d reached out to Amazon customer service and asked them to make it right.
Their response was to offer her a £10 voucher.
About £1 for each ounce of the indignity she had suffered.
I’ve yet to discuss this with anyone inside or outside the company who didn’t find the response woefully insufficient. And yet, it’s what “Earth’s most customer-centric company” actually did.
There’s room for subjectivity in deciding how to respond in a situation like this one. But the response chosen was objectively outrageous.
The Amazon I joined in 2016 was customer obsessed.
The focus on quality and precision in the warehouse operation were exceptional. We would tirelessly dig into performance gaps, sometimes expending disproportionate focus in the name of nailing the customer experience. After safety, it was our top priority, and everything else we did flowed from it.
The operation was a mirror of the overall business philosophy, and you could feel it as a customer.
Parcel a day late? Here’s a month’s free Prime membership.
Received the wrong item? Keep it. We’ll send you the correct item within 24 hours.
Driver was discourteous or erroneous? Here’s a gift voucher. Stick with us, we’ll fix it.
Can’t prove what happened? We’ll take your word for it unless you give us reason not to.
That attitude carried Amazon to the top.
But as time bears on, we have cause to wonder whether that was all an intricate trap masquerading as a genuine philosophy. Was the move to lull customers into a long-term relationship and then subtly erode service levels to increase profits?
Amazon’s been squeezing its customer service budget, and it shows. If this continues, Piss Gate will become a common occurrence.
Here’s a live example.
Recently, I noticed a fraudulent charge on my personal credit card. I did what you do, which is call the bank to cancel the card and reissue a new one. I then reviewed historical bills to spot any other unauthorized charges.
And that’s when I found it. Amazon had been double-billing me for Prime membership for the past 40 months, to the tune of about 400 dollars. The Amazon charges were the only rogue transactions, I had only one Prime account, and no one else had access to the credit card.
Should I have noticed sooner? Yes. Ironically, Amazon was keeping me so busy that life details likes this one slipped by sometimes.
So I did what you do. I reached out to customer service.
I got my law degree mainly for the jokes, but luckily you don’t need a doctorate in juridical science to know that it’s unlawful for a company to charge twice for the same service. So I felt confident in a swift refund.
My confidence was naive. 120 minutes later, I was acquainted with Amazon’s updated version of customer service … a continuation of the downward spiral portended by Piss Gate.
First, the automated menu which must be tricked in order to reach a human. Then, the queue for said human. Then, explaining the problem repeatedly and providing 40 pasted transaction IDs to prove I wasn’t making it all up.
The representative concluded that I had indeed been charged twice for the same service. Apparently there was a rogue account using my credit card information to pay for Prime.
But, grinning through toothy lie, they told me there was nothing they could do.
They had no choice under “company policy” but to retain my stolen funds in their corporate coffers. In fact, they wouldn’t even halt the recurring charges, though luckily I had already done that through my bank.
Because the rogue account wasn’t mine, I apparently didn’t have the authority to contest the transactions.
But yet, it was mine enough that charging my credit card for it was acceptable. So I paid for it, but I couldn’t do anything with it.
This was a dishonest pretense designed to frustrate rather than resolve. I recognized it from my many years wrestling with military personnel offices, which are (a) breeding grounds for monsters and (b) clearly Amazon’s customer service recruitment hunting ground.
I asked for the case to be escalated. A “manager” joined the chat. I re-explained. They reiterated the “policy” and decision almost word-for-word.
I asked for a further escalation and articulated how I felt about them in clear terms. Aloof to irony, they told me to file a report of cyber crime with the local police. They then hung up the chat.
I had been promised an additional response within six hours. It never came. Nor a chat transcript, which I had also requested, though it shouldn’t be necessary to ask.
I’ve been a Prime subscriber since 2008, and spent over £15,000 on Amazon in that time. I’m also a former employee and long-time shareholder.
Not exactly a scammer’s profile.
But none of this was a match for the overwhelming stupidity of the process I confronted over a relatively small amount of money in a very clear case of double charging.
Welcome to Amazon 2.0.
Amazon 2.0 has traded customer delight for pinching, bleeding and pilfering from its customer base. Instead of logically resolving an issue, they add friction to the process in an effort to deny the customer a fair outcome. No longer the paragon of online retail, the company has devolved into a gaggle of used car salesmen.
This is profit obsession at the cost of fairness and reasonability. They’re robbing me simply because they can, which is Enron-level cynicism.
I don’t know why I would be surprised. A company that will fire people and instill pay freezes against the backdrop of record profits has whiskey in its moral compass.
I reckon the shotgun-style layoffs of the last couple years have impacted customer service staffs, stretching overworked managers and specialists to the point they are now reliant on pre-formulated responses, canned verbiage, and brainless non-resolutions to customer problems.
Little surprise then that Amazon customer satisfaction declined from 88% to 79% over the past decade, taking it below the levels achieved by Etsy, Nordstrom, and Macy’s. Totally ordinary.
This is not customer obsession, or even customer satisfaction. Fighting with zombies and pull string dolls when you have a problem, only to be left dissatisfied and unresolved, is a mediocre experience. It is unworthy of an expensive premium.
What’s next in Amazon’s devolution? Open hostility to customers?
This is how companies behave when they don’t feel threatened in the marketplace anymore. When they’ve achieved enough monopolistic coverage of a market to feel emboldened. At that point, they drop the mask and openly admit customers and employees are gullible suckers.
I’ve been telling my friends for a while now that I think Amazon is over-valued. If it can’t pay its employees properly, the business model isn’t right. If it needs to cut staffing and reduce salaries when it makes profit, there is something deeper wrong with it.
I renew those concerns here. Being willing to piss away the loyalty of a veteran employee and long-standing Prime member for the sake of not giving back a few hundred in demonstrable overcharges … reflects a business that doesn’t even know what’s in its interest anymore.
And my little skirmish is apparently just the tip of the shiteberg.
The FTC is suing Amazon for charging people Prime fees without their permission, continuing to charge them even after they complain, and making it hard to cancel. To be sued by the US Government, you have to be doing some truly repugnant shit. This is like one snake suing another for being in the grass.
I’m not the only one standing on the dental chair with a set of pliers to get back double charges. Turns out this problem is widespread, and people are only getting it resolved when they get help from media.
In the UK network, there’s a grim scandal threatening to bankrupt hundreds of small businesses which sell their goods in the Amazon marketplace. The company imposed new layers of administration on businesses but is taking months to work through their re-certification.
In the meantime, it is refusing to pay their sales revenue, triggering calls from legislators to release the money until it gets its act together.
There is a pattern here of Amazon hoarding money it hasn’t earned. Money earned by others or money passing through criminality. That kind of shadiness is fraud-adjacent, and is usually trying to obscure flaws in the underlying business model. Well-functioning businesses have no need of unearned profits.
Bezos agrees with me that there’s never been a better time to sell. You don’t sell $8.5B in 9 trading days unless you’re convinced the only way is down.
I recommend he also stop his Prime membership.
Have you had issues with Amazon customer service? Have you noticed a drop in customer service quality over time? Comment on this post or email me at tc.radarinsights@gmail.com.
Tony is an independent writer, speaker, coach, and consultant on leadership in organizations. He is a former General Manager with Amazon, having been part of the company’s three-fold UK growth from 2016-2023.
