We may sometimes look at those who have more money than us and think that they are somehow untouchable. A simple story about Jeff Bezos, however, shows you that uncomfortable issues can happen to any of us.
During a meeting that Jeff Bezos was having, he decided to show just how good his customer service representatives were. He decided to call his customer service in the middle of the meeting and he didn’t care if it was an awkward stunt or not.
As you can imagine, there is a lot of pressure associated with owning a billion-dollar business. You want to make sure that everything is in place, but it doesn’t matter how big you are, you’re not too big to fall. In fact, they often say that the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Jeff Bezos is the former CEO of Amazon and one of the richest men in the world. During the early days of Amazon, he wanted to ensure that his company was running smoothly.
He was speaking on a podcast in 2023 and spoke about a stunt he pulled off to teach his staff a lesson. According to the data he had, customers were waiting only one minute before they were connected with a customer service representative.
The strange thing is, he had complaints that were coming to him that his customer service representatives were not answering that quickly. One customer staff member was trying to convince him that everything was okay during the meeting but he decided to prove that it wasn’t.
He said: “‘I have a saying which is: when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.
“It doesn’t mean you just slavishly follow the anecdotes then, it means you go examine the data.
“’It’s usually not that the data is being miscollected, it’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing.”
That’s when he decided to call customer service himself to check on the wait time. He said that everyone was silent as they were on hold and it took about 10 minutes before they were connected.
Bezos said: “It dramatically made my point that something was wrong with the data collection. That set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right.
“That is an example of truth telling. That is an uncomfortable thing to do but you have to seek the truth even when it is uncomfortable.”