Mental Pivot #28: Pastries, Amazon, Backwards
My local bakery nails the customer experience and “Working Backwards” by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr—a book about Amazon’s business principles.
When Amazon relaunched their streaming video product in 2008 (after their first failed attempt a few years earlier), the service was beset with technical issues. Chief among them was the problem of rebuffering. This occurs when there’s a delay between the video downloading speed and the video playback. The result was a degraded user experience—instead of watching their favorite films in the comfort of home, many Amazon customers saw frozen images and stuttering video.
Amazon, recognizing their failure to deliver an optimal consumer experience, took decisive action. In his 2012 shareholder letter, CEO Jeff Bezos recounts how they handled the video rebuffering issue:
We build automated systems that look for occasions when we’ve provided a customer experience that isn’t up to our standards, and those systems then proactively refund customers.
One industry observer recently received an automated email from us that said, “We noticed that you experienced poor video playback while watching the following rental on Amazon Video on Demand: Casablanca. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and have issued you a refund for the following amount: $2.99. We hope to see you again soon.”
Surprised by the proactive refund, he ended up writing about the experience: “Amazon ‘noticed that I experienced poor video playback…’’ And they decided to give me a refund because of that? Wow…talk about putting customers first.”
A few days back, my wife ordered a half-dozen items from a local bakery—morning buns, croissants, pain au chocolat—and asked me to go pick them up. I dutifully did so, and upon returning home I opened the sealed box of baked goodies only to discover that half the order was missing.
In a huff, I headed back to the bakery in a bad mood—muttering to myself about wasted time and the bakery’s incompetence. Once there, an apologetic bakery worker took my box and told me to wait a few minutes while he fixed the mistake.
As I waited for them to correct my order, my analytical side perked up. I wondered: “Is this the kind of company where they’ll just throw the missing items in the box and bid me on my way? Or will they approach this like Amazon and go the extra distance?” Given my experience with most businesses, I didn’t have high expectations.
The worker interrupted my thoughts, “I’m so sorry about that! Everything’s in the box now.” Handing over the pastry box, he added, “I put a dark chocolate brownie in there as well for you to enjoy.”
A small act to be sure, but a wholly disarming one. My previous annoyance evaporated, and I walked home with a smile rather than frown. It’s crazy to think that a negative customer experience can be turned into a positive one by such small acts of goodwill like a $2.99 refund or a complimentary treat. But they work, often to great effect.
And yes, if you must know, the brownie was delicious
Now onto the updates…
What’s New on the Blog:
Book Notes: “Working Backwards” by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
This book explores the principles and processes that internet juggernaut Amazon has employed to become one of the most successful companies in history. The authors are highly qualified to write about Amazon’s business practices; both served a cumulative 27 years as senior executives within the company and worked directly with founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos. Both are firm in their conviction that “Amazon’s concrete, replicable principles and practices can be learned by anyone and scaled throughout a company” (I can see many of the practices being worthwhile in personal, non-business settings too).
I particularly enjoyed the idea of “written narratives” in lieu of PowerPoint presentations. The written narrative is a 6-page document that explores a business idea, process, or proposal in thoughtful prose rather than short bullet points. It’s an idea worth exploring.
If you want to get a taste for the book without reading it, check out this episode of the A16Z podcast, Amazon Narratives, featuring a conversation with the authors.
Articles:
Beware of Books!: Otis Houstin writes about the new literary moralism whereby past and present writers are scrutinized for their moral sins and shortcomings.
Could the Simpsons Replace its Voice Actors with AI?: Most of the voice cast is approaching retirement age. Amit Katwala looks at the technological and legal challenges of machine-generated voice-acting. Check out the YouTube channel Speaking of AI for interesting examples of AI-generated celebrity voice acting.
The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?: I’m usually wary of these sorts of pieces, but this one comes from the venerable Tim O’Reilly. He identifies four key challenges ahead: domain-expertise, a changing regulatory landscape, capital requirements, and risk tolerance. Valid points for sure, but I’m far more optimistic about the region’s resilience and capabilities in all four areas.
Genre Is Disappearing, What Comes Next?: Given the significant changes in music consumption in recent years (e.g., digital streaming and subscriptions vs. content purchasing, radio, and physical media), it follows that music discovery must also change.
Let There Be More Biographies of Failures: Henry Oliver gives a fascinating account about Belgian entrepreneur Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and his failed attempt at organizing all the world’s information. It’s the same mission Google famously claims, but Otlet attempted to do so in 1892 with 3×5” index cards.
Moore’s Law for Everything: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, offers a description of the impending seismic shifts in technology along with his plan for how to navigate this uncertain future.
To Organize the World’s Information: Dmitri Kyle Brereton considers the metaphors used to organize information online, the limitations of the dominant metaphors, and the opportunities presented by overlooked metaphors.
The Part-Time Creator Manifesto: Shawn Wang lays out inspirational principles and a better definition of success for those who are engaged in modest side-projects.
Seven Habits that Shaped My Last Decade: Eugene Yan’s thoughts on reading, gratitude, meditation, energy management, exercise, writing, and investing.
Podcasts
99% Invisible: The Megaplex!: In 1995, the first movie megaplex in the United States opened, the AMC Grand 24 in Dallas. For a time, megaplexes dominated the industry and upended the economics and creative output of Hollywood.
David Eagleman on Tapping into the Livewired Brain: Eagleman, a neuroscientist and author of Livewired, discusses brain plasticity and sensory adaptability with Sean Carroll (host of the Minsdscape podcast).
Final Thoughts on Free Will: Sam Harris presents his full argument on the illusion of free will. Agree or disagree, the host always provokes reflection. His thought experiment in which you think of a movie (at the 22:00 mark) is something I’m still pondering.
Late Night Wars: This 6-episode mini-series from the Business War podcast looks at the history of American late-night talk shows from the 1950s up to the present. Key figures like Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Arsenio Hall, and Conan O’Brien figure prominently in the narrative.
Odds & Ends:
Edison Research’s annual report, The Infinite Dial 2021, on digital media consumer behavior in America is available freely as a PDF download. If you’re interested in consumer trends and charts showing brand awareness and technology habits, this report has you covered. If you’d prefer the podcast-specific findings, you can read this article based on the report, The State of Podcast Listening for 2021.
Rephonic’s Podcast Audience Graph is a podcast discovery tool that analyzes 2.8 million connections between podcasts based on the “Listeners also subscribed to” section of Apple Podcasts. Enter the name of a program and the tool shows you the associated subscriptions. For example, fans of Paul Cooper’s excellent Fall of Civilizations podcast can find related programming via the graph based on listener data.
The Rephonic tool reminds me of the Google Experiment “An Ocean of Books” which lets users explore the connections and relationships between different authors through the metaphor of a fantasy map (where islands are authors and cities are individual book titles).
Interneting is Hard is a collection of well-designed tutorials for beginners interested in learning HTML and CSS.
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