• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos even so personally reads customer-complaint emails sent to him, even though he doesn't respond to many of them, he said during an onstage interview Friday.
  • Often he'll forwards those emails to the executives in charge, with a single character: a question mark.
  • The manager who receives the email is then on the claw to drop everything, research the situation, and write a well-crafted response.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a notorious addiction of sending his executives an e-mail that has a single character: a question mark.

When the executive gets an email from Bezos that merely reads "?" they know that Bezos is concerned about something because a customer complained, Bezos explained during an onstage interview at the George Bush Presidential Center on Friday.

"I still have an email address customers can write to," Bezos said. Although he doesn't typically reply those emails himself, he does read them.

"I see most of those emails. I see them and I forward them to the executives in charge of the area with a question mark. It'due south shorthand [for], 'Can you look into this?' 'Why is this happening?'" Bezos said.

Getting such an email is a pretty common affair at Amazon, and it's also a big bargain. The executive, in turn, will ofttimes foward it to the manager in charge of the area who will view the email with a sinking heart, 1 of them recently told united states.

That's because the manager is then on the hook to drop everything, investigate, and get dorsum with an answer. Sometimes that means a lot of research over nights and weekends, the Amazon manager recently told u.s.a..

Simply Bezos views that email address, jeff@amazon.com, as a way to stay close to customers, which can otherwise be hard to do equally an executive who is far removed from twenty-four hour period-to-day customer service and sees the visitor generally through data and reports.

"We take tons of metrics," Bezos explained. "When you are shipping billions of packages a year, you demand good information and metrics: Are you delivering on time? Delivering on time to every metropolis? To apartment complexes? ... Whether the packages have besides much air in them, wasteful packaging?"

So those customer complaints gives him front end-line insights. If all his data says 1 matter and a few customers say something else, he believes the customers.

"The matter I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually correct. There'southward something wrong with the manner you are measuring it," he explained.

This is i of the ways Bezos expresses what he calls one of Amazon's most important values: customer obsession.

"We talk most it,customer obsession, as opposed tocompetitor obsession," he said. Often companies say they are focused on customers, only they really spend near of their energy reacting to and talking near competitors.

"If your whole civilisation is competitor-obsessed, information technology's hard to stay motivated if you are out in front end. Whereas customers are also unsatisfied, ever discontent, ever want more. So no matter how far in front end you get in front of competitors, you are still behind your customers. They are e'er pulling y'all along," he said.

This postal service originally appeared on Business organization Insider.