Jeff Bezos Once Picked Up The Phone And Called Amazon Customer Support To Make A Point And Set Off 'Whole Chain Of Events': Here's Why

In the early days of Amazon.com, Inc., the e-commerce giant’s founder Jeff Bezos, once called the company’s customer service while he was in a weekly business review, just to prove a point.

What Happened: Last year in December, Lex Fridman posted a podcast session he had with Bezos on YouTube, during which the Amazon founder recalled the time when he noticed a mismatch between customer complaints and the company’s data.

Bezos said that he has a saying, “When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.” However, that doesn’t mean he would blindly go with the anecdotes. So, the tech mogul decided to test the system himself.

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He called the customer service line right then when the weekly business review was taking place, and they all waited. While the company’s metrics indicated a wait time of less than 60 seconds, Bezos said he had to wait for several minutes.

“It was really long. More than 10 minutes, I think,” he said, adding, “And so, you know, it dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection.”

This discovery led to a reassessment of the company’s data collection methods. It “set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right.” Bezos also said that often miscalculation of data is not the problem. Most of the time, it is the wrong metrics that are being measured.

So, if many customers are complaining about something, yet the company’s metrics suggest there’s no issue, one should question the validity of those metrics.

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Why It Matters: Founded on July 5, 1994, Amazon now boasts a market cap of $1.866 trillion. The company went public on May 15, 1997, with shares priced at $18 each.

In April earlier this year, Amazon reported its first-quarter net sales of $143.3 billion, marking a 13% increase year-over-year. The total also beat the Street consensus estimate of $142.5 billion, according to data from Benzinga Pro.

Meanwhile, Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021, is currently ranked second on the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, with a net worth of $202 billion.

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