An interesting article (registration req'd.) on the power of Amazon's customer service. From Joe Nocera,
It has been years since I looked in on Amazon. Once upon a time, of course, it was a highflying Internet stock, one of the handful of Internet companies — along with Yahoo, eBay and AOL —whose stock only seemed to go in one direction: up. Henry Blodget made his bones, in no small part, by being a screaming Amazon bull.
Then came the bust, and Wall Street began to see Amazon in a decidedly different light. It was just another retailer, the bears said, that happened to sell goods online — and had immense, unanticipated infrastructure and technology costs. Its founder and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, spent huge sums of money on such “frills” as free shipping, which depressed its operating margins. Indeed, those margins — which got as low as 3 percent — were more akin to Wal-Mart’s than that of a big-time tech company. At one point, in mid-2000, a bond analyst named Ravi Suria made his bones by predicting that the company could run out of cash. The stock dropped into single digits.
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There is simply no question that Mr. Bezos’s obsession with his customers — and the long term — has paid off, even if he had to take some hits to the stock price along the way. Surely, it was worth it. As for me, the $500 favor the company did for me this Christmas will surely rebound in additional business down the line. Why would I ever shop anywhere else online? Then again, there may be another reason good customer service makes sense. “Jeff used to say that if you did something good for one customer, they would tell 100 customers,” Mr. Kotha said.
I guess that’s what I just did.
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