I Visited Amazon. Here's What I Learned.

Whether you think Amazon is the greatest company on earth or the most evil company on earth, they are building the most customer-centric company on earth.

You cannot talk about customer experience without talking about Amazon because they have changed the game for every single business on the planet. Whether you think Amazon’s internal practices are wonderful or terrible, what they are doing is working. Amazon caters to the customer that seeks a frictionless, on-demand, and personalized customer experience. In fact, their personalized recommendation system generates 35 percent of all sales for the company.

Seeing It For Myself

In November of 2018, I had the chance to go to Seattle and visit Amazon for myself. I have written about Amazon for years, and been a customer since 2009. I was expecting some kind of magic show. But instead, I met caring, humble, hardworking, and thoughtful people.

I was in a group of six authors, thought leaders, and professors on an Amazon influencer symposium. We had many chances to ask Amazon executives questions in intimate meet and greets. I posed a question to one longtime senior Amazon executive:

“Who owns customer experience at Amazon?”

I was curious if he would mention a chief customer evangelist or chief marketing officer. But he was confused, and I had to repeat the question for him. It turns out everyone—literally everyone—owns it. The thought of making one single person responsible for millions of customers seemed ridiculous and impossible. That person would be a figurehead and nothing more.

Amazon culture is customer- obsessed, and all executives reflect this focus. Amazon employees are told not to concern themselves with external rumors or gossip. Bezos said once in an employee meeting, “Look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning . . . but don’t be worried about our competitors because they’re never going to send us any money anyway. Let’s be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.”

Bezos, the richest man on earth, recently said that he doesn’t believe Amazon is “too big to fail.” He said, “In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their life spans tend to be thirty-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.” He added, “The key to prolonging that demise is for the company to ‘obsess over customers’ and to avoid looking inward, worrying about itself.” He said, “If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end. . . We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.”

Focus

Being focused, and having a customer experience mindset, is a tool that Amazon uses. What are employees focusing on? At most companies you would find that focus is across the map. Marketing is focused on getting as many eyeballs as possible, sales is focused on getting the most sales, and customer service is focused on solving as many customer issues as possible while cutting costs for the company. At Amazon, everyone would tell you the same thing: They are building the world’s most customer-focused company.

Focus is a behavior driven by goals; key performance indicators that employee performance is measured by. With companies being siloed, often these KPIs are all over the map. Frequently, KPIs are not tied to customer experience, and as a result there is no single focus at the company.

Goals matter. The goals of the company matter. Broken down, the goals of business divisions matter, and the goals of the teams working in those divisions matter. To take this a step further, the goals of the individual employee matter. They accumulate to create a company culture, a mindset.

When I walked the halls of Amazon’s Fulfilment center B414, famous for Kiva robots that move equipment, I read the many signs all over the building: “Start with the customer and work backward. We work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust.”

And, “Pay attention to competitors but obsess over customers.”

And lastly, “We consider the customer in everything we do.”

In an organization there is often so much chaos and noise, it is not clear what the focus should be. Sometimes work doesn’t seem to be about work at all—it’s about simply not drowning in corporate culture. If employees are busy playing politics or navigating bureaucracy, they lose the ability to focus. Today’s business environment is cutthroat. If all of your energies are not focused on a common goal, you risk being bulldozed by a more agile company, an Amazon.

Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist who was called “The Queen of Customer Experience” by Meta. For more content on how some companies are excelling at serving customers today, read her book The Customer Of The Future.