Last year, a woman in Georgia needed some toilet paper. A lot of toilet paper. 3 whole cases of the stuff.
Not for horrible bowel problems (that we know of), but for an office building she managed.
So, like most people who need… anything, she went on Amazon and placed the order.
$88 for the toilet paper, 2 day shipping.
She apparently didn’t read the fine print on the checkout page.
Prime members don’t have to worry about shipping, right?
Wrong!
A third party seller charged her over $7000 for shipping.
But she didn’t notice right away. The toilet paper arrived, the people in the office began… using it, and all was well.
Until she checked the bank balance.
Amazon is known for their excellent customer service.
And I didn’t write this post today to call them out. Normally everything goes fine and they take care of problems quickly.
But they are a HUGE company. And with size often comes complexity.
Customer service gets systematized. Humans making decisions are replaced with policies and rules.
Agents become NPC’s, unable or unwilling to look and think beyond the policies they’re evaluated on. Not worth the risk, personally.
In this case, Amazon’s rules apparently stated that if the shipment was on time and not damaged, then there was no cause for a refund of shipping charges.
So for multiple complaints about this, our hapless customer received multiple copies of the same corporate form letter.
The delivery was on time, the product was undamaged, no refund.
She even wrote a letter to the CEO Jeff Bezos.
For those who are unaware, letters to the CEO don’t really go to the CEO.
At any company. They just have a slightly higher level of NPC to respond to them.
I know this because I used to be such an NPC. We were sending letters from “The Office of the CEO and President of Bank of America.” But in reality we were a team out outsourced nobodies in a suburban Colorado warehouse. Many were temps.
Anyways, none of this poor woman’s efforts worked. No matter who she contacted at Amazon, she just got the same NPC reply.
IF SHIPMENT ON TIME AND UNDAMAGED >> SEND NO REFUND FORM LETTER
It took a complaint to the local TV station to get this resolved. Amazon eventually refunded the full charge, including the cost of the toilet paper.
(I’ll resist the temptation to make the obvious joke about “shitty” customer service here!)
But here’s the thing…
How many separate agents/NPC’s handled this woman’s complaints?
How did ALL of them miss the obvious overcharge for shipping? Did none of them want to take the “risk” of stopping their work for a minute and alerting someone higher up at the company?
Or if they did, did these managers simply ignore it? Better to go about your day, get paid, not make waves?
Deviating from policy is punished in these organizations. And even worse than punishment is attention from supervisors. It’s almost never a good thing.
This system sets people up to cover their own ass. To do what they’re told, no more and no less. Sticking your neck out to help a customer is ignored at best, but usually punished.
If you run your customer service team in a conventional way, you are incentivizing this sort of behavior.
What’s the fix?
I write about it here: https://gum.co/rkbth
— Mark
