If you work for Amazon, getting a dreaded "question mark" email from the boss, Jeff Bezos, is very bad news. Photo / AP
If you work for Amazon, getting a dreaded "question mark" email from the boss, Jeff Bezos, is very bad news. Photo / AP
If you work at Amazon, this is not the email you want to receive.
Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person and head of a nearly US$1 trillion e-commerce giant employing more than 600,000 people, still reads emails from customers at his jeff@amazon.com address.
And sometimes, he will forward complaints on to his executives with just a single character, "?". "I see most of those emails, I don't answer very many of them any more but I see them and I forward some of them, the ones that catch my curiosity," Bezos told a leadership conference at the Bush Center in Washington DC last week.
"I forward them to the executives in charge of that area with a question mark, and that question mark is just a shorthand for, 'Can you look into this, why is this happening, what's going on?'"
One Amazon executive told Business Insider getting a dreaded "question mark email" — which arrive fairly often — is a big deal. They will then forward the email to the manager responsible, who opens it with a "sinking heart".
That's because they will immediately have to drop everything to investigate the complaint and report back — even if it means staying back nights or weekends.
Bezos said it was important for him to stay directly connected with customers because it was easy to fall into the trap of relying too heavily on data and metrics. "I'm actually a big fan of anecdotes in business," he said.
"We have tons of metrics, we have weekly business reviews, metric decks, we know so many things about the customers — whether we're delivering on time, whether the packages have too much air in them — we have so many metrics that we monitor.
"And the thing I have noticed is that when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.
"There's something wrong with the way you're measuring it. When you're shipping billions of packages a year, for sure you need good data and metrics, but then you need to check that data with your intuition and your instincts."
Bezos said one of Amazon's most important values was "customer obsession". We talk about it, customer obsession, as opposed to competitor obsession," he said.
"If your whole culture is competitor-obsessed, it's hard to stay motivated if you are out in front. Whereas customers are also unsatisfied, always discontent, always want more.
"So no matter how far in front you get in front of competitors, you are still behind your customers. They are always pulling you along."
That customer obsession was highlighted recently in a brutal anecdote from Brad Stone's book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, in which the former vice president of customer service Bill Price was asked how long telephone support times were.
Without any evidence said they were less than a minute — so Bezos decided to check. "Really?" he said. "Let's see."
He then dialled the Amazon support line on the meeting room's speakerphone, forcing 30 executives to sit through four-and-a-half agonising minutes until someone picked up.
"I'm just calling to check," Bezos reportedly said, slamming the phone down. Price resigned less than a year later.
Speaking at the Bush Center forum, Bezos described Amazon as having the "weirdest meeting culture you will ever encounter". "No PowerPoints are used inside of Amazon," he said.
"New executives have a little bit of culture shock in their first Amazon meeting, because what we do is somebody has prepared a six-page memo, a narratively structured memo [with] real sentences, topic sentences, verbs, nouns. It's not just bullet points, and it's supposed to create the context for what will then be discussed."
Bezos said everyone would then silently read the memo. "So it's like a study hall. Everybody sits around the table and we read silently for usually about half an hour, and then we discuss it.
"The reason we read them in the room is because just like high school kids, executives will bluff their way through the meeting as if they've read the memo."
He shared a number of other anecdotes, including the "two pizza" rule. "We try to create teams that are no larger than can be fed with two pizzas — we call that the 'two pizza team' rule," he said.
"I love coming in to work because I get to work in the future. If something has pulled me into the present, it's because something has gone wrong, it's a firefighting exercise."
Bezos added that companies had to "be willing to be misunderstood" if they were going to do anything new or innovative, citing the introduction of customer reviews as an example.
"A thousand years ago, we started this thing called customer reviews," he said.
"Customers could come in and rate a book between one and five stars and write a text-based review. It's now a very normal thing, but back then it was crazy.
"The book publishers did not like this, because of course not all the reviews are positive. I got a letter from one publisher that said, 'I have a good idea for you, why don't you just publish the positive customer reviews?'
"The argument he was making to me is that our sales would go up if we just published the positive customer reviews.
"I thought about this and I thought, I don't actually believe this because I don't think we make money when we sell something, we make money when we help someone make a purchase decision.
"It's a slightly different way of looking at it. If you think about it that way then we want negative reviews too, and it's come full circle now where the product manufacturers user customer reviews to improve the next generation of the product."
On Thursday, Amazon surprised the market by more than doubling its quarterly profit despite heavy spending on continued expansion. Shares in the e-commerce giant surged nearly 8 per cent on the news, pushing Bezos' net worth up 4 per cent to a staggering US$126.5 billion ($179b).
