“To be Earth’s most customer-centric company” is the motto with which Amazon was born, the company that revolutionised the world of retail. The meaning of this phrase is “To be the most customer-centric company in the world”, so from the very beginning Amazon put the customer at the centre of the project.
Amazon was born in 1994 as an online bookshop, and then expanded its offer to other consumer goods as well. To get an idea of Amazon’s exponential growth, you just have to look at the numbers:
- first company in the sector by revenue, equal to almost 233 billion dollars;
- second employer in the USA with over 566,000 employees;
- second company by stock market capitalisation.
The reasons that favoured this growth are many: from aggressive commercial strategies to the courage to impose drastic changes to the development and implementation of new technologies. Customer service, however, was the real secret of Amazon’s boom.
In the following paragraphs we therefore focus on the customer service techniques adopted by Amazon and how to learn to use them for your own business.
How the customer experience changed with Amazon
To differentiate itself from the competition, the Seattle company understood that it had to offer something more to customers. For this reason it built a customer experience tailored to measure for every customer. At the same time it adopted quantifiable indicators to foresee buyers’ behaviours and habits.
Today Amazon has available a sort of customer card with all the data, which makes it possible to sort the results based on the search, suggest other related products and build purchasing bundles on the basis of previous spending. In addition to improving the customer experience, the sales volume is considerably increased.
Jeff Bezos, the visionary founder of Amazon, introduced further improvements to shape the purchase, as a tailor would with a suit, to the individual needs of every user. From this perspective the following innovations were introduced:
- a “mobile-first” approach, that is, designing the user’s journey from a smartphone;
- division of products into categories to facilitate browsing;
- addition of filters for products;
- constantly updating the customer on the status of orders, on the arrival of new products and on all the news;
- auto-completion of words in the search bar.
Users’ interest must be continually stimulated, just as the shopping experience must be gratifying and satisfying at 360°.
The importance of customer service
To understand how Amazon overturned the concept of customer service, we have to take a leap back in time of almost 30 years. Today buying online is a completely normal practice, but in 1994 the web represented a world with many shadows and few lights. There were few people who bought on the Internet because they did not have trust in the online world.
Trust is precisely the key word on which Jeff Bezos focused: building customer loyalty and convincing the customer of the reliability of the web was the first step to take. Today on Amazon thousands of FAQs are available, that is, articles that contain the answers to the most frequent questions.
Amazon also introduced the first “self-service” approach, thanks to which users could solve problems and find answers to their questions in total autonomy. In addition, forums were also introduced, where users could easily exchange information, opinions and advice in order to make the most appropriate purchase according to their needs.
Reviews too have taken on great importance in the work of building customer loyalty. Before buying a product consumers can read the reviews of other users, in order to assess its merits, defects and main characteristics. 90% of customers consider it important to compare notes with the experiences of other people before proceeding to the final purchase.
Negative reviews must not be ignored; indeed, paradoxically they can be more useful than positive ones. They help the company understand what the defects of a product or a service are and make the appropriate changes. To find out more we have prepared a specific article in which we explain what the mistakes to avoid in customer service are. By providing a solution to the customer’s problem you save the relationship with them, and at the same time you give a reliable image of yourself to the other users.
What to do today to improve customer service?
Taking inspiration from Amazon’s teachings, we at We Are Fiber have worked in these years to create an efficient and proactive customer service. The partners who have relied on our service have calculated a 31% reduction in the cart abandonment rate, with a dizzying growth in sales that in some cases has even reached 37%.
Our service is based on:
- an efficient and perfectly coordinated team;
- advanced technology to collect data and extract fundamental information;
- the use of CRM to create better relationships with customers and build loyalty;
- an empathetic and professional approach to solve every difficulty encountered by customers in a short time.
Do you want to know more?
Contact us now and enter the big family of We Are Fiber; we have a solution to every problem.
