"I've never had a problem with Amazon particularly and this article seems rather strange to me."
I had a problem with Amazon once, they repeatedly messed up a delivery. I emailed Jeff Bezos, got a call the next day from his office and my problem was solved.
> Amazon is another prime example of a company that does customer service well - though that might have some consequences on their work culture (mistakes are not easily forgiven - since the cost is so high).
Certainly not. In fact they have one of the most incompetent customer services. When I changed my bank account, they didn't change my bank account, but rather created a new user with the new bank data. Then when I asked them to remove the old wrong account, they were very nice confirming that they will do that. But instead they deleted my new account, with only the old account remaining. When complaining about that they ignored it, so I just deleted my old account also, and am a happy non-Amazon customer since.
>"Every time it lays waste to a Blockbuster or a Best Buy, it puts tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of people out of work."
Two companies well-known for bad service and misleading/fraudulent business practices.
>"For now, businesses that are in competition with Amazon can take comfort in the fact that Amazon is not now (and probably won't be, any time soon) all about customer service."
Customer service is actually the key reason I keep coming back to Amazon and stopped using terrible businesses like Blockbuster and Best Buy years ago.
Everything is hassle free and Amazon has always acted instantly to satisfy me when I've had an issue from returns to stolen packages or streaming video hiccups.
Amazon makes it right, the first time, every time. Amazon didn't kill those places, they did it to themselves, years ago.
> the best I ended up with was having them flag my account to avoid Amazon Logistics deliveries whenever possible.
IIRC, Amazon.com customer support can only request the flag, but it can be denied. That's what happened to me, and I still get stuff delivered by Amazon Logistics.
At least their service has improved somewhat since then.
Amazon always ships packages ahead of time, at my leisure, and often cheaper than retail. They always process returns and complaints in my favour, without contest. They reach out to local logistics companies in order to improve delivery, and I can tell by the fact that those companies now have branded vehicles (and much happier and more attentive personnel than UPS!), and better verification processes (they found a logistics provider that actually emails the signature given at the door to you when the delivery is processed) that they've done well out of that.
I feel they're serving me very well as a customer, and every ordinary person in my life who isn't competing with Amazon is richer and happier because of Amazon's services.
> definitely not ... the businesses on the platform
The businesses fulfilling through Amazon would absolutely not have received my business were it not for Amazon; in many cases they do not have the expertise to handle the orders correctly, and I do not trust all of them to process the payments securely to the degree that I trust Amazon to.
They have every opportunity to improve their ordering and fulfillment systems, but they choose Amazon because it's where the customers are comfortable already.
I dreamt of a logistics integration system much like Amazon Marketplace when I was 16, and every year they make it closer to that dream, I think it's great. I'm willing to accept an argument from concrete evidence that they have somehow deliberately and systematically broken the law in so doing, but I've yet to see it.
> tricked people into signing up for Prime subscriptions. 'We have been deliberately confusing,'
I'm happy to see this being criticized, though the fact that its intentional should be obvious to anyone who has used Amazon. This is the main reason I have all but stopped using Amazon, why would I order from a vendor that is literally trying to trick me (steal from me) in every interaction?
> people self-censoring to avoid getting on the wrong side of the algorithm
Not sure what you mean by this.
> This is a situation Amazon has engineered
I agree but I disagree with you as to why. I see two distinct issues.
1. Amazon marketplace reliability/integrity.
2. Customer support escalation process.
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1. I think Amazon does an abhorrent job, it's the wild west with regards to quality, fraud. & counterfeits. I personally don't trust it.
2. Unfortunately almost everywhere cuts costs and uses automation & frontline works but I think Amazon has a significantly above average process for a large company. The jeff@amazon.com is a very publicized escalation option/safety valve, which worked in this case & I am not aware of for other large brands. It's unfortunate they had a bad call the first time, but that happens. If this sort of thing happened with another retailer (although it's less likely to), I doubt they would have handled it until they went to twitter or was generating press with the story.
• Prime shipping is no longer certain to be two days.
• Those which are assured to arrive within two days don't always do so, but I never get a credit for that delay against my prime membership for a failure to meet their SLA even though I'm supposedly covered with some sort of guarantee.
• Prime shipping is no longer certain to source from Amazon warehouses.
• And worst of all: Amazon commingles Amazon-sourced with FBA merchandise. I've had numerous issues with counterfeits from "sold by Amazon" listings in the last two years because of this.
>I've sat in on calls with Amazon Employees where they tell you to do exactly this to boost sales.
Well that's next level depressing.
It's weird. All these amazon complaints - they ring true to me...yet I've thus far escaped the negatives thus far despite heavy amazon use (say package every 48hrs).
Personally I've found Amazon's customer service is pretty reasonable (sometimes you need to dig in the site to find something). I know they aren't a great company in other ways - their workers are poorly paid and overworked, but that's one thing I'm not worried about.
> What happens if Amazon decides, for some reason that they will not explain and that you can't appeal, to cancel your account? Then you can't even go grocery shopping?
Only if they have a monopoly, if this proves successful I expect other shops will start investing in this too (or licence the technology). You're just as likely to have an issue currently if you live in Bumfuck, Nowhere and the only store around refuses to serve you because they suspect you of stealing.
>It's the carriers (USPS, FedEx, UPS etc.) who leave your purchases on the street, not Amazon. Amazon can't micromanage their shipping partners to alter the way they do deliveries.
Amazon has been using their own delivery service here for quite a few of my orders, and they don't always know what they are doing. I would wager this is why the parent was facing problems.
I've actually had to contact Amazon about this several times after we moved to this location. To the extent where I was seriously annoyed that I couldn't find a customer service option right on the order page and instead had to click separately through their customer service flow, only to find that the agent has no idea what order I'm concerned about, and that I have to go through the whole rigmarole of telling them my name (if you have an uncommon name like mine, this quickly becomes a chore), address, order, etc.
To Amazon's credit, they've always made it right with me, but I shouldn't have to contact them every week about this issue. That's at least partly the reason I canceled our membership.
> Deal with Amazon's new, terrible delivery service
God, this has bitten me more times than it should have before I stopped buying from Amazon. Several times they marked an item as delivered even though it wasn't (I was home all day and nobody came to the door for any reason, no trucks on the street), presumably because they have a package quota and they aggressively overstuff their drivers. Once they delivered it, but left it right at the head of my driveway. What a huge pain.
That is the product and it's clear Bezos & crew obsessed on getting commerce to be as frictionless as possible & earning customer loyalty. Dealing with Amazon as a customer is still 2x better than any other online retailer in my experience.
> I'm not sure I'd allow the delivery times and customer support to be attributed as a real thing to Amazon.
Amazon has "Amazon Lockers", which let me accept deliveries at a time convenient to me, with no human interaction. This is a real improvement over previous methods, and AFAIK no other retailer in my country has anything similar.
> On top of that, Amazon is more than willing to fix its errors.
In my experience, this is less true than it used to be. For example, my mom ordered a DVD in early December to be given as a Christmas gift. It was a Prime item, and she is a Prime subscriber. For some reason, it wasn't showing that it would be delivered until just before Christmas. Even though this was odd — and arguably a breach of the Prime agreement — she figured it was no big deal because it would be in time for Christmas. Then, just before it was supposed to be delivered, Amazon updated the delivery to after Christmas. This was actually OK by her, since the recipient (my daughter) would still be at her house for a few days after Christmas. Again, just before it was to be delivered, they updated the shipping again, and now said it would arrive Jan 15 to Jan 30. When she chatted the Amazon reps, they just said sorry for the inconvenience, and offered nothing for this shipping miss. Eventually they agreed to put a credit on her account for the inconvenience, but the credit never actually materialized.
We canceled the order and bought the DVD (plus digital copy!) from Walmart. This is just one of many negative customer service experiences we've had with Amazon in the last few months. The other big problem is that they now want each return put in its own box — even if it was shipped to us with multiple other items that are also being returned. We have been Prime customers for years, but perhaps not for much longer.
> Does anyone really think Amazon is the world's "most customer-centric company" now?
Absolutely, their customer support is stellar, across countries.
The problem of fake reviews and junk products is indeed a real problem. But I would argue that this by itself doesn't imply that Amazon doesn't care about it's customers, rather that it is a general problem that's largely unsolved in most (BIG) online marketplaces where manual curation of inventory is not feasible due to scale.
>Also, Amazon is usually very good about protecting buyers from scams.
Retrospectively...sometimes.
Don't get me wrong I like them (average like a package every 48 hrs) but I have fairly limited confidence in their ability to protect people. Especially with the inventory co-mingling fiasco.
> There is no way to ship $71 Billion of product and get every product and every shipment perfect every time.
Yes, exactly. But they don't explain it to the customer. They ship right-away another packet. Why? Because what they are actually doing is either saying to the courier "You failed to deliver in our crazy-efficient time table, we won't pay you" or to the third party seller "You failed to meet our standards, we have sent a replacement but you'll cover all expenses".
> I've returned a product for not meeting the description, and within 15 minutes of me getting the email saying they'd received the product, credited my card the full amount
Again, as above. They usually do this with marketplace products. What they did behind the courtains is saying to the seller "The product didn't meet customer expectations. We refunded it, you will pay all related expenses".
> everal days later, the description was corrected and the product was again orderable. That violates the "[they] still make nothing to fix them" claim I think.
This was probably the third party seller who fixed the description to avoid paying again.
Note: At this point you say "Wow, they are just pushing sellers for quality" WRONG. Because customers are not always right :) Most of the times they are dead wrong actually (or they are just abusing the fact that they know that Amazon consider them always right). It is rotten ethic to just dump all expenses on sellers without even giving them (most of the times) the chance to reply or to take action.
> I think you're ascribing a mercenary "screw it, it's cheaper to not fix" mentality when an alternative and more likely (IMO) possibility is "look, we can't fix everything, so when we fail our customers, we need to be very good at making it right".
No, i'm saying that they place crazy efficiency requirements and while they understand - as you said - that shit might happen, all they do is dumping all costs of their policy on partners. And partners can't do literally nothing. Why? Because Amazon pays out every 2 weeks, they will just keep the money from your wired amount. Because if you don't comply they just ban. And if they are the only marketplace, you are shut down.
This isn't even considering the amount of stress and pressure that this 0 tolerance policy is causing on their own employees and connected partners employees.
>if amazon's customer service wasnt so good i would have dropped them already.
And this is why Jeff Bezos is sitting on (maybe) the biggest pile of money anyone has ever had, and why counterfeiting is not a problem Amazon will ever be interested in solving. It doesn't matter. People either don't notice that they've wound up with a counterfeit, or they don't blame it on Amazon. They just return it or write it off and remain customers.
"I've never had a problem with Amazon particularly and this article seems rather strange to me."
I had a problem with Amazon once, they repeatedly messed up a delivery. I emailed Jeff Bezos, got a call the next day from his office and my problem was solved.
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