Oh mischaracterized this, but it is not unusual in startups, which has turned out to be my life's work that many, many, many, many things are all breaking at once and they tend to land on customer service. This episode is sponsored by frank terra dot com. Frontera is building the low efficient freight transport marketplace, linking BTB shippers to the most efficient carrier for each route in North America searching, compare instant, all inclusive free quotes and book shipments online. 24 7 on freight era dot com. That's F R E I G H T E R A dot com. Hi, I'm Dave chappelle and I'd like to welcome you to the invent like an owner podcast where I talk with the amazonians who helped build amazon into one of the world's most valuable companies. This weekly podcast is for entrepreneurs, business leaders and all students of history.

The goal of the podcast is to capture amazon creation stories and create a historical archive and that's it. On that note, my guests are recalling history as best they can. It's possible some of the details are fuzzy or they're gonna be wrong live with it. That happens. It isn't intentional. I invite future guests are commenters on the website of which there are plenty to help us get the facts as straight as they can be now on with the show today, I'm thrilled to be talking with jane slate and Colleen Byron, two of the original rock stars who helped senior leaders helped build the amazon customer service organization, helped build out the team plan the software tools which have scaled amazon to manage hundreds of thousands of professional customer service employees around the world. And Jane started in 96. Colleen started in 1997. And so they're going to tell us how they help make incremental and step changes to manage the growth of amazon customer service. I know they're going to have a bunch of interesting stories. In fact, I guarantee it because I listened to a podcast with jane a few years ago that will be repeating some of and I will link to it in the show notes.

But anyway, welcome jane and Colleen. Thank you. Thank you Dave. So let's just jump right in Jane. You arrived in 1996. Tell us what Amazon customer service was like. Like put it in perspective because now everybody thinks of it as a million plus employees. Were there a million employees when you got there? There were not a million, there's 20 something employees at that time. In the whole company there were three people doing customer service. three. And were you hired to be the manager or were you just one of the customer service employees know at that point they hired us just to come to the company like I didn't know what I was going to do. So they just figured you can right you can speak your friendly, you're a generalist customer service and then we'll just grow people into whatever we need.

So um I did customer service to start out. Yeah. What were the tools like? Was it established software? Were you sitting there with a computer console of answering the phone? Established software? No it wasn't established software. It was an X. Terminal. Yeah like a dumb terminal with a C. Prompt. Just like one line C prompt. There was nothing graphic. They had to teach you the commands and we just were at the command line. And were you all working out of one inbox? Like was there an engineer assigned to help build this out and manage it?

Like. What was it like? To be honest I have no idea if we were working. I'm sure there was one in box. Yes, I'm sure there was. And I just think we were opening message by message. Yeah. And we would like, we would lock out a section of them and we would be responsible for us or do we lock them out one at a time? I think one at a time. Yeah, I think it was one of the I'll get back to I joined in 98 which was, you know, eons later than you two. But I do remember like you would sort of freeze the message or was it called locking?

You would lock the message when you went in to work on it. Nobody else would grab it. And so that was like, that was the same back then. But even more primitive. Yeah. And it wasn't so strange because my email was still I was doing email at the speakeasy, like not even in my own home, I would go to an internet cafe and that was no graphical user interface either. So it wasn't that weird. Right? And so what would a typical customer interaction be like in 1996 with three customer service reps would it be? Actually? I got a question from jess she box, she was an early program manager for customer service. She sent in a bunch of questions today and she said she was asking basically about memorizing command line and how long would that not scale.

So what were those questions like and how would you deal with them with the tools you have? Honestly in the beginning the questions were these were early adopters. So these were people comfortable with technology, probably more comfortable with technology than I was. And they were just very much like I want to get this thing, what's it, like, what's going on in the background? You know, it was very much, can I get this book, Can I get this book? You know, the questions they didn't expect very much. So they didn't have hard questions. Um sometimes I might run over to the warehouse and see if something shipped yet and maybe we could put two of them together or pull them up.

It was, we couldn't do very much, we had no visibility into the order process. We could really make sort of changes on the account, like address changes. The commands were simple because we actually couldn't do very much. So what would would lead somebody to go down to the warehouse versus making an intercompany email request or just didn't exist? That wasn't a thing. There was no real time communication in the company. We literally walked from one room through a hallway and down to the warehouse. There was no communication. So we would just find the order in a bin. I can't even remember how we found it in a bin. But I think the books weren't in bins for just for the order at that time they were, I don't know in alphabetical or numerical order. Something was like a library.

We would just go and maybe try to stop in order if somebody wanted to try to cancel it. There was very little we could do. So it was mostly asking informational questions quite honestly. How did people get trained if it's command line and you're doing command line instructions that you literally have a list of stuff on the wall. I'm asking these questions for perspective for a start up, you know, that's thinking about, hey, we're ready to launch and we don't, who's going to answer the, who's going to answer the questions and stuff. There wasn't even a piece of paper. Like I had to grab a notebook and write down. They just told me what the commands were and they were increasing daily. They would try to think of something new to be able to do like any time we would need to do something, we would say,

hey, how would we do this? And they would go, whoa, good question. And they would right up a little script and then we would add it to our little notebook and it was changing so fast that training was really just a side by side scenario and I know you laughed when I mentioned tech support or an engineer for customer service, but they had to have built something by the christmas of 96 or definitely by christmas of 97. Right. No. All right, we'll get to that. So I wanted to ask. So do you remember christmas of 96? Like, I remember christmas of 98 things were pretty bonkers then, you know,

like that's when it had really like, what was 96 like, was it even worse because you were so small and then you had a huge pop or was it not that big christmas wasn't a big deal? As I recall. The first big deal was mid May, 1996. And that was the Wall Street Journal article on Jeff Bezos, Was it just a profile on him? Yes, but it was the first National Press and Wall Street Journal was taken pretty seriously. And so it was the first time anybody ever took me seriously when it came to the job. And it was our first pop in orders. And it was our first flood of people who weren't early adopters. And then it was just very, very visible and more and more people. So it's snowballed from there.

That was that was the one I remember. That was the first, whoa. And could you tell based on the types of questions like where these people asking, how do I order a book on the internet or was it these people were asking, what was the internet? Yes, like what do I do? Or um and we kind of hit the telephone number I believe if I'm not mistaken. So it was mostly email which was unheard of in customer service email, customer service was not a thing. So it was funny for people to write to us. And once we started displaying the phone number, it was very much like how do I I the page just ends and we would have to explain scrolling down a web page or you know things like people would call us and tell us to you know talk to not google but yahoo Tell hotmail like as though the Internet were an office building or a group just not understanding at all what this was. Was it in that 96 97 window where it started to switch more from phone to email. Did we start to remove the phone to get people?

It was the opposite direction. It started out email really only and then people started to complain that they couldn't find the phone number if I'm not mistaken Colleen. So the phone number became a little bit more prominent but we still were trying to funnel people to email. When I first started we had a chunky telephone with four lines line one, line two. It was again, we weren't really set up as a business taking phone calls until the Columbia building. When was that? It was March of 97. I think I actually think I got there in 96 because there for the Wall Street Journal article. So you got to update your linked in? I stole that off of Linkin. So anyway, well, that's good to know. We'll get there.

So, one question I had because when I got there, I just remember we would all work in customer service, like we would all be there, whether it's working, planning launches or we would and we'll get to customer connection. But I just remember like all the customer service reps or it seemed had advanced degrees, like super smart book lovers. Was that the norm? Was that by design was, you know, how did that happen? So the recruiting that Jeff was doing pre anything was he really wanted people who were generalists who were just raw smart people. He was ask you for your test scores. He would, he wanted people who have followed a thread of something really,

really far. So hence people with advanced degrees. And he wanted people who could stick to something had creative minds and just like raw smarts. And so that's sort of a general profile that they were hiring was kind of pre NBA pre your wave was just really raw people. He wanted people that he could just say do this thing and we honestly wouldn't question him because we didn't know enough to question him. So and then they also expected people to come into customer service and fill out in other areas of the company. So there was just something funny about like advanced degrees being some proxy for. I can stick to a really hard brain exercise. How long did that person type? How soon did they get frustrated by the help me with the internet thing? You know what I mean? Like I like I I think that's funny because you are helping people and it's rewarding but like was that a problem with people as they had to answer that question over and over and over or was it? You know just fun because people were enthusiastic and discovering the internet not till a little later. Did that become boring partially because everything was changing so fast and you know even when you were there, amazon is adding products and areas there were always hard problems. Always,

always and we were involved in solving the hard problems. It wasn't like customer service was you know not consulted, we were all together in a pig pile at amazon. So everybody was at amazon and involved in building. So it really wasn't until later when there were so many people that customer service where people were no longer involved in the building. But also by that time it was sort of the tools became better. So it was this nice switch where the tools were easier and you could hire people who, you know, kind of just wanted to go home at night. Yeah. When you got past those first waves of questions about how does the internet work? What's the number one customer service problem? It might still be the same one, was it? Where's my order, was it?

You know? Where's my stuff? Where's my stuff? Followed by, cancel my stuff, followed by followed by I got somebody else's stuff. Yeah, switch to rio the switcheroo. Nice. So back to the surge, The Wall Street Journal surge. So that was an unplanned surge were pretty unplanned right like you didn't know that was coming. I mean you knew that there may have been a story coming, but you hadn't had a previous Wall Street Journal story like for the unplanned surge like that. What happened? Did people just work around the clock?

Did you try to staff it? Did you? All of, you know, because you didn't have any more tools? The tools weren't coming anytime soon. So was it just an around the clock exercise to keep up? Yes, there were, there were six people and customers, so I think there were six people and customers served five when I started. And when the Wall Street Journal article, we were greatly hampered by the fact that I was in the queue answering emails and I was rubbish at it. But that was sort of the first time the light went off and I said we got to get a pipeline full of people because this is going to take off. I knew it. So Colleen,

what did you do before? Because you you were the first person hired to lead customer service, is that right? Yeah. And so where did you come from? Did you do customer service before? Were you the first person that had traditional customer service experience? Probably I probably was. I don't know, I didn't look at their resumes. We all just ground running with our hair on fire. I'd be immediately before amazon I was five years with the consulting practice in the area of product support, technical support and customer service, working with technology companies. And so I would often report, almost always reported to the CFO of whatever software company I was working with.

And Jeff was interviewing for Cfos in that year and a half before we found joy. And every time he interviewed a CFO, he said who should be talking to you about customer service. And so it's just it was just a weird confluence of events that he heard my name several times, you know? So he got me in for an interview and I remember that is his assistant called me, kim Christensen called me and said, you know, we'd like you to come in for an interview and it's just an internet company and I said well I'm happy to come in and talk to you, but I'm not interested in full time employment, but I'd be happy to talk to you as a potential client, right, kim was like well we'll need a resume. And I said, well I don't I don't have a resume and I mean I can be a little bit but you know it's the whole thing was just too but then I met Jeff, I went in for the meeting and I met Jeff and it was like this guy's going places I'm in,

whatever it is I'm in because this is happening. And so you were there earlier than I thought. So it was this pretty similar situation when you arrived, you arrived a little after jane. So did you have a were you hired with a list of things like no you have to do or you know, so before before the five years of consulting the last job, big job I've had was as director of customer service for a company that became adobe. It was purchased by Adobe called Aldous. And they had a program called Page Maker. So I've been the sixth employee at Aldous and sort of written that up in the way. It had been a sort of a darling of the industry story to as amazon became back before now. But anyway, so that was my experience. So I was I seemed like a grown up and I was much older than everyone else which also made me seem very grown up, was older than Jeff and I still am. So yes I was coming and when I came in there were five people sitting in a big room at X terms with command line prompts you know doing and there was a latin honest and there was a Shakespearean somebody with a PhD in Shakespeare if that's possible.

But it is whatever Simon leaks deal was. I know there was some sort of expert on Shakespearean english Shakespearean place. There was a very strange man in the corner completely g eking out with credit cards. He had something called CC motel, which was credit cards went in, but they didn't come out and there was some sort of horrible nightmare happening with him. There was a linguist, there was a Rhodes scholar and there was jane, these were the people in the room and Jeff said, customer services over there have a good and that's the last time I talked to the man for like three months. Yeah. And so was was it quickly? I mean you mentioned quickly you determined we need to build a pipeline. I briefly tried to become a customer service agent because I thought I should understand what these guys were doing, but I truly was not good at it. And also it was real clear around the time of the Wall Street Journal that somebody actually needed to pull their nose up and looking down the horizon and start planning for what this was going to be.

So my job was to start putting the structure in place to be resilient enough to manage what I perceived was a tsunami of growth headed toward us. So clearly jane. All of these people became leaders, the people who were there when I got there and some of them quickly went off onto other departments while jane and I built a pipeline to bring in a whole bunch of, you know, we don't need to hire one person, we need to hire five or six. And then we started our provisional early template of a training program. And bear in mind the people we were hiring, we're all, you know, they were these disaffected phds and Master's program wannabes were dropouts or there were these very, very, very bright people Come work for us for $10 an hour in stock options. You know what our stock options I mean it was not a good pitch. It was really hard to get them in the door but we did and then there was this laborious training process for working in UNIX at a command line prompt and oh by the way,

don't leave any of the tools open because it will bring the whole website down kind of thing. It was just it was a bit mad. We needed people who could write. So that was part of it. Like at this point we needed people who could write and communicate because most customer service was on the telephone and ours mostly email and so people with good judgment who could write, who could handle technology that's like a tall order for a temp. And were you all working out of like text blurb files that you copied from one to another? Like how did you eventually, you eventually had to build it up. But that at the beginning there was mischaracterized this, but it is not unusual in startups, which has turned out to be my life's work that many, many, many, many things are all breaking at once and they tend to land on customer service. So it took us up to get to a certain place of volume where the piles of broken things could be sufficiently addressed with a blurb for that series of broken things.

Until that point there was a lot of writing on the fly and there were some little paragraphs we could insert and sort of stitch blurbs together to address things that had layered problems in them. I think jane you moved to training but before I want to ask about that, but Colleen, who did you report into? And the reason I'm asking the question is, how tuned in were you unexpected growth? Like where is the CFO saying, hey, we're expecting to christmas to eight X. So plan for that. Like, like how did you get that information? Well I reported to Jeff and again, it was only like 50 people in the company. It was a small group, maybe six years.

I don't know, it was, it wasn't very many people, but I reported to Jeff until Dell's L got there until Rick deals out there and rick was the Cto after Shell Catherine who Shell was employee number one or two, depending how you count it, the first Cto who built the website. And so that's rick. I've been told to give definitions of people we mentioned because we're dropping a lot of names on earlier. Thank you. So Jeff and I had a just a very sort of Vulcan mind meld relationship. One of the things I've always loved about Jeff and one of the reasons we got along so well is that he was a great, is a great respecter or at that time was a great respecter of intuition and he actually looked for intuitive qualities and people that he hired in those early days. And I tend to have that in spades. So I could sort of read the play, coming at me with Jeff most of the time. And I had my own instinct about what this was going to be,

and my own instinct was that there was no time for sleep and that we had to just grow, grow, grow, grow, grow right. And so did you ask jane to move over to training? And I think jane was in training for like five minutes because jane was in training until, you know, we Margaret, I can't remember her name. She was fantastic at johnson johnson, johnson God, she was good. We needed jane and we needed five jane's, you know, we needed a bunch of different places at once.

But my recollection is he only did that while we were for a short time, right? Like four or five months, maybe three months. I did it up into the Columbia building. So it must have been six months or so. Yeah. And so did you focus on temp agencies? Was it full time hiring? Like or was it a mix of everything? Was temp agencies away when I got there? You know, I just, and again, the Wall Street Journal article thing, it was like,

okay, we need more people like we're getting behind, we need to be caught up. There's a wave coming at us, let's run some ads and gets, and it became clear within three or four weeks that running ads and traditional recruiting processes, we're going to be completely inadequate to our needs. And we needed to be hoovering up great clumps of people at a time. So I reached out to every temp agency in town and said, this is what I'm looking for. And I'm going to give you feedback every time we send me a batch of people, I'm going to tell you who didn't work and why they didn't work. And if you can't hit the caliber of people I need, you're not going to be doing this anymore. I made stuff up. I said,

I'm gonna be hired 500 people in the next two years, which turned out I undersold it, you know, but it got their attention and those who partnered with us most ably just and you know, they got a little piece of that action. They stayed on the temp payroll for, I think four weeks or something. And then we converted them to employees. So they made money on doing all of that recruiting for us. Dave Seattle was an odd place, a perfect place for that at the time. There was a lot, it was the whole slacking thing. There were a lot of underemployed people culturally. Underemployed on purpose in Seattle at that time and hiring through temp agencies are just taking on a temp job for a while. That was a thing.

So it wasn't, that was just a great, we were in a great place for that. It was a perfect fit for what amazon was looking for types of people and their mentality. They enjoyed it or it was a good fit. So I asked about technology a few times. So now we're moving along a little bit and at some point you did get resources or people assigned or I'm sure you yelled begged borrowed, steal them. You had resources. Like tell me about the brute force versus the technology like how did see us scale eventually? Oh God, hysterical laughter. The first step was, first of all, there was no end of begging, bribery,

bitching, you know, you know, standing on top of tables and trying to get it and it was, there's, there's just no resources were coming to customer service, get over it, go away, answer the emails and stop bothering us. It is not going to happen. You know, we have other things that are on more fire, hotter fire at greater risk than you guys suck it up buttercup. So I started, I'm gonna take all the credit for this. But you know,

there were a lot of really smart people in there and I started, what I thought of in my own head is the disaffected PhD Skunk works. And I started recruiting directly into the University of Washington, looking for people who were just that they were unhappy with their graduate programs in math or computer science or physics. In one case I'll never forget, there was this incredible higher we made a guy named Clark Grub, God love him. I think he was at the time he was a night manager in a hotel down by the airport. I hired Clark Grub at Jib Jab After I left amazon, I went to, my friend founded the company Jib jab, you know this land is your land video and Clark joined us as an engineer from when he moved down to L. A. Clark had a degree in physics and he was, he's a very humble, very modest guy.

And so I was like you and the handful of guys and I think there are mostly guys and stuck them in a corner and gave them books on pearl and SQL and said I want you to do half time answering customer service emails and the other half time I want you to read these books and start writing PERL scripts. And that was how we started to get some automation in customer service. And meanwhile, you know these guys are writing code and checking it in right to the main pile of untested governed ungovernable possibly code. That was the amazon website. Anyway, that was worked great because suddenly we had tools, suddenly we had ways of being more efficient meeting our customer needs in a much, much, much faster and more efficient way, both at the bale handling level and at the tool, operating on orders level. But you also had people building the tools who had experienced answering the questions. So that's what you said. They did a couple of hours doing it. It's not just a a,

you had to know what you had to do customer service first and that was what was so hard that you can imagine trying to recruit these people for $10 an hour and stock options. They didn't know what those were when you were there. Was it all homegrown home built? Did you try licensing any third party customer service software or was it all built internally? I met with many vendors and in fact some of them were people I socialized with in Seattle and they would come in and little missy and explain what they could do for us and we would explain the volume that where we were already. They would have their smile pasted on their face and they could not handle the volume. Like the stuff that we had already built internally was so far beyond what they could do. They absolutely couldn't handle it and we need to move forward fast. So we made the decision that no one could help us at that time. That's not surprising. But I'll ask the next leading question because every department had some, did we hire any customer service experts? You know, the consultants or that came in or is it all really was homegrown? I mean, that's a really good question.

Dave and it points to one of amazon's key success factors, I believe, and that is the insistence on customer focus across the board. There was nobody in that company that owned customer service. We all owned customer service and I've never to this day been involved with the company. Who there were so many people across the board who would ask the question, how does that affect the customer in all parts of the company? In the warehouse and marketing meetings and editorial meetings everywhere? How does that affect the customer? So you know customer expertise is in the D. N. A. Of that company. I agree. Like I say it to people all the time in amazon obviously has great customer service. Like I'm a fan boy,

that's pretty obvious. But the bar has been lowered so low nowadays that just to have any company that provides good customer services like unusual, you know what I mean? In great customer service is a rarity. At least I find like when I go to R. E. I. I am in love with Ari I like the people they hire are knowledgeable there obviously into outdoors, but that's a rare exception you know versus other stores. And I feel that way about most of the people I worked with an amazon, like everybody really cared and did what they could to either build things the right way or fix things, you know or go the extra mile. So Dave you said we wanted us to keep in mind people who are listening to this, who might be growing companies of building companies in those years when I was doing consulting, I'll never forget one of the Cfos who hired me said the feeling around here is that customer service can't really help us, but it can hurt us,

right? And I thought, oh this is going to be something to overcome my reason that Jeff and I hit it off is that we had the same understanding or he got what I was preached selling about customer service, which is that you cannot possibly afford, no one can possibly afford to acquire any other way the information about their customers that is coming in the door free over the phone and through email. And if you're smart about that. And if you regard every single customer contact, unless they're just calling to say, I love you, Which did happen at amazon, Unless they're calling to say, I love you. Every single customer contact is a measure of a failure. Somewhere in the organization. Something has gone wrong to cause my customer to have to reach out and ask me a question. It didn't go perfectly.

Um, we did not achieve customer ecstasy, right? So that's the approach you have to customer service so that all of those defects can be measured and delivered to the group responsible for the repair of that defect. Is it a problem on the web in the case of amazon, was it an editorial problem or a catalogue problem or data that we had wrong from the publisher? You know, do we have far upstream? We have to go with that wasn't an engineering problem and so on. And so did the team of clark rub and other pearl scriptures. Did they start logging the, you know the problem and tabulating like these are where my order problems these like when did we start doing that jane? It seems to me that was pretty. I mean we got we had a gross map for it, gotten enormously more discreet over time. So when we were sort of at the gross level we could say sort of who was calling to cancel?

Who was calling for? Where's my stuff, that kind of stuff. And in fact, I remember it being in the Columbia building where we first started building customer service tools, I think self service, sorry, self service on the website. I remember presenting the idea to Jeff that we prioritise those based on the most frequent contacts in here where the here were they and what was the most frequent contact. But I want to cancel my order. And I remember the resistance to being able to let customers cancel an order was huge and I was just puzzled by that because that seems like a fear response that I had never seen an amazon and I was fully know they trust us so much that giving them the opportunity to cancel their order is that's the cementing of the relationship. And I remember the board was actually having a board meeting and they wanted me to present to them on customer self service and we had the little controversy there and patty stonecipher was on the board and she was saying you know you got to listen to this, this is you know, don't worry, let go forth. And I remember we had a bunch of cancellations when we first put that self service up there and there was just a little bit of woe and then it was just more orders post that more than made up for that like the trust relationship,

the bond between the customer and amazon really, it was great because so customer self service was a great scaling opportunity. And also like Colleen said we had all the information about what they wanted to do and what they needed to be able to do. So we just mapped it over. I don't know if that launched in 98 but after I got there or before, I'm sure there were multiple versions of it. I remember when it sort of got it added to the top nav, you know, or you know, for people that were coming back that had orders in process, you guys got some above the fold real estate to start anticipating questions. Maybe this is a redundant question, but I'm sure there were 80 20 type questions, where's my stuff? But then there are the longer tail questions like, you know,

how did you get to? I don't know if it was the two of you or somebody like how did the organization sort of figure out these are the top 10 that we're going to do first and then we're gonna do these the next ones to start empowering customers. We started tracking contacts per order and we were already industry wise, I can't remember how he figured this out, but fairly low contacts per order because our self service was going and the website was going well, but we definitely had a big load of customer service and we were only growing and I remember we were sort of at a standstill, we've gotten all of the big things and then what was left was this long tail. This was actually the last thing I did at amazon. So lots of things outsourcing. I did all kinds of stuff in the middle. But then at the end there was a cross functional group and we looked at some serious data mining, like we went back and we find tooth comb to customer service and we basically had this giant list of what was still wrong and they were all such small problems that they weren't getting attention. So we did this sort of bundling of problems where we said, here's this bundle of small problems that can be fixed, say in the supply chain pipeline or in on the website. And if you team on the website,

team and supply chain, solve this bundle, you will have contributed to profitability of amazon of this chunk. And so it was a little bit of a Gamification of solving those problems and they just looked at this and they were like, oh I can do this over the weekend and there was just this great surge of we can do this. And my husband just finished up working in amazon and he saw a presentation of the how contacts per order just plummeted like right after that project, it was just a crazy plummet and they just sort of knocked down all the little things, a little ankle biting things that were going on. And it was a great exercise. Yeah, I do remember how big of a deal it was. It was probably multiple iterations from, you know, Marion mo heat and the site design team because it was, it was operations obviously what you were doing. But it was also you had to figure out how to put it in front of customers.

And I remember another example of, we would know that this person's order was delayed because the book was not, you know what I mean? It was a remainder book or something, whatever. It was a book that wasn't going to ship to them on time. But rather than telling them four days, you know, as soon as we find out they would find out when their promise was broken in five days. And it was things like that, like letting people know ahead of time. It's better to let them know the bad news ahead of time than have him wait five days and then get the bad news mariam. Oh he did lead that sort of like an understanding of customer promise. What were all the promises that were making all along the way? How do we represent that at a data level? And then how does the machine notice that the promise has been not kept?

Like you say ahead of time and since the whole store is a piece of software, we did know the intelligence was in there. We just weren't asking the machine to figure it out. So you mentioned increasing productivity. So for startups, like what are the first metrics when you think about the most basic of metrics that you probably started tracking and reporting on and the ones that took things off a cliff in a good way. They're like what were the key metrics that you thought about in those years? Was it contacts for order? Was it complaints? Different questions. I mean you asked a question about the most basic things that you start measuring and then how do you get off the cliff? I mean off the cliff is a mature company goal. At the very beginning, you're looking at really primitive things like context per order would be considered a sophisticated thing at the very beginning of a software companies life, what you're looking at at is a grocer sort of more gross anatomy, which is how many X's kind of customer service person do in a day in a shift.

How many emails can they answer? How many, how many emails phone calls? How many, how many are deferred? How many email? How far we were running over the holidays? Four days late in getting emails answered, which was incredibly painful. So we would do these round the clock shifts of just get that on christmas Eve, there would be a bunch of us blurry eyed sitting in front of the computer, answering them in real time. And for a few hours we would be completely caught up on emails but we couldn't maintain it because it was a trap. But anyway, to get back to, yeah,

so you're talking about overall volume, how many people does it take to handle it? And then you get into one of the most common things were getting asked about and how do we fix that? It's very gross in a young companies life for the first year or two. So you talked about the holidays actually wanted to ask because most of the stories of the holidays in those early days where we all got flown to distribution centers around the country. You know, I spent three years in Campbellsville Kentucky in the warehouse. Was that same thing going on in customer service or were you more asked to handle that with hiring and training because you knew you would need the employees after christmas too. First of all, after I got there, we did every all hands on deck over christmas and nobody takes any time off at christmas. We also were sending people to the warehouse, which was nuts. So we finally had to make a call, gotta have customer service people. We were asking people who have been through customer service training,

who worked elsewhere in the company to come in and get on the lines and take the easier questions once the company got bigger and we expanded into europe when I was running the London office, even though it's sort of hurt the U. K. Operations, London backed up in the email queues, are guys got out of the UK email queues and jumped into the U. S. Email queues and helped knock him back down a little bit. Obviously that's, you know, was expanded even more. Yes. So when did the, maybe if this isn't an outshoot a vet, but amazon now has, I think it's called customer connection.

I could be wrong about that where most employees have a rotation through customer service. I don't know if it's at a certain management level or something. Was that formalized back when you two were there or you know, that's something. Where did it come from? Did it come from Jeff? Did it like where did that idea come from from, Jack? I can't remember. But I trained David Risher when he got hired. I mean, I I trained everybody. Yeah. David Risher was a senior vice president of marketing and product and came from Microsoft. And so you trained David on how to answer questions in the queue. Yes.

I mean he Yeah, I trained everybody. Everybody that came in. I trained until a certain point where that just didn't scale and they needed to get to work. But it was great. And even when we had people come back in who had never been trained software engineers over christmas doing email because they couldn't, you know, we needed them in corporate. They couldn't fly away. But they were terrible. But that was okay because they were good enough and they were very slow, but they would see the wrong things. So it was brilliant. There was always just this frenetic, you know, going back to their office and fixing things once they were in customer service first.

So I always tell Neil Roseman, another, I don't always title did all kinds of things. But I just remember in Campbellsville I'd be there working and Neil would be over with engineers fixing things because they could see the problems in real time and fix them in a way that if they're sitting in Seattle, they're probably not thinking about it the same way because they're not touching it. So it was pretty awesome getting everybody into those areas where they didn't normally work with so that the problems become more real. Yeah, well, I'm pretty sure they still do that customer service rotation. I'm not, I don't know what it's called, but I think it's customer connection. The other thing that's worth noting for your listeners. Dave is that something that we did very intentionally at amazon was we treated customer service as an incubator for jobs elsewhere in the company. And in fact, I had to stand in the doorway with flaming swords to keep managers who shall remain nameless from coming in and poaching people too early.

I said I have to have them for at least six months because it takes two months to train them and two months for him to figure out what they're doing. And then I got two months of good productivity. But we populated the rest of the company with people from customer service. So people would show up in editorial and quality of Q. And everything else knowing how the company worked, which is a real advantage over people who came in out from somewhere else and had to learn how the company worked. I think it's one of amazon's superpowers. I do. I think it's one of those super powers and that it really hurts when you lose a great employee. But the company gets so much better because that great employees in this other team. And then they understand customer service and they share that with other people. So it does think though when you lose that superstar performer, that's okay mom, you should keep the pipeline full. It was the right thing to do. No question.

As we expanded from books to music. I always say that that seemed like a simpler expansion like and I only say it because there similar and form factors, size and description and but like what was an example of a product line or an international expansion. That was a real problem for customer service in particular. You know like electronics where people started having you know, help support issues on how it works or like is there anything that jumps out at you? That was a unanticipated problem. Well I have one this is even in books. So Jeff decided he wanted the earth's biggest bookstore. And so one night he added every book known in the english language to our catalogue. And just sort of put no particular promise as to when we were going to be able to fulfill that. So that was the first time we had to adjust because you know, we had absolutely no source for these things. Used bookstores, had zero technology and pretty soon a ridiculous percentage of our orders. Like the next day,

the day after we're four out of print books, would you have to go look for them? Then we would go, oh my gosh, luckily again, Seattle tons of Portland. I went down to Powell's. I mean it was crazy. We had this fax machine. So the reason why that's interesting is because that was a whole different sourcing model, very, very distributed sourcing model. So that rocked our world for that reason. But it was a really great learning experience dealing with very small vendors. So that was an early marketplace sort of fingers into it. And then we also did some fun things and customer service that didn't really work out,

but we're good learning experiences, auctions, customer service for auctions, Music was nothing compared to auctions. Alison Kirk. Alison Kirk used to work and see how she still curses me over auctions. So she literally did in an email a couple of days ago, she's like, still can't talk to you about that. Yeah, that was that was interesting. And that was hard because in that case we went from being a pure retailer where we sold it where you had to do customer service for both the seller and the buyer, and we thought about it the head time, like, I remember coming over to the building and working with Alison and Adam peck and other people on that team. But we couldn't anticipate like it was a new,

totally new thing. And even like there was customers, a lot of customer service in the buying process, the auctioning process. So luckily Allison had experience in that I believe she had worked at Sotheby's or something. I have one listener question which is kind of fun guy named Seth whizzing. He's married to an ex Amazonian. He said, what's the most memorable online complaint you can recall receiving? I figured you'd have something, some story or you or somebody on your team, anything that jumps out at you. For me, it was just so much more about categories of people. I mean, and also just that putting a certain category of people with a certain customer service rep.

There was this guy named Nick who was just a love and he would get a grandma on the phone or just an older woman really needed to go to this guy and you would hear these conversations in the background of just, oh, you know, it's almost like a flirtatious people. People in books, I mean those were really fun customer service interactions, creepy sometimes, but fun because people are very attached to books and you know, a lot about someone with their books and they're getting very excited. So yeah, I mean, we would go and I think we got a page out of an out of print book that had been missing a page. It was crucial for someone we had, you know, so it's the books are more fun than almost anything else. Yeah,

well, I think a lot of us went there because we love books, you know, if you really think about it, like it's a neat company and Jeff was inspiring in the mission, but the first thing we all loved was that we all were book lovers and then sort of grew from there. So when you think back and you both worked at a start as freight terra startup now, like, like what would you think the customer service lessons are for fast growth start ups? Like not startups that you know, sort of not very many, but like the ones that are really taking off if you step back and you were advising them on what to do and how to do it, what do you take from what you learned with amazon and elsewhere. And you know, the big things I'm working with a free Terror dot com is a, is a third party logistics company out of Canada.

And some of the problems they have are very Amazonian in nature. You know, the sort of supply chain, even though freight is a very different supply chain, same supply chain issues, relationship issues. They have amazing people in customer service, many in Serbia, wonderful people to meet their absolutely doing it like amazon did their hiring brilliant, Very good communicators and they're feeding that information back into the machine. You know, my husband is there as well, he's in software and we're just very much like making sure their processes are good. He's on engineering excellence and I'm on cause analysis of all this like really showing them contacts, per booking and it's the same thing 20 years later and you know, they're really rolling with it is really so we can feed this information in and and as it scales,

you just need that engine to be tighter. This company is a distributed company. They've never all worked together, they're all over the world, so it's the same thing and Dave, I would say the two things, I would advise anybody who's got a start up right now, particularly fast growth startup is hire the brightest people you can for customer service and have a plan for what you're going to do with the data coming into that organization, Consider every contact, meaningful data and that you want to get to the bottom of what that can do for your company to improve everything about the way your company operates. That's awesome. Well I keep going a little over so we'll end there. Thank you both so much. It's also just awesome to see you. That's part of the fun here is getting to talk to people I haven't seen in a long time. It's really fun to see you.

Great, thank you. It's really interesting. Again, I joked with somebody earlier today, I said everything that was at amazon before I got there was always there, you know, like, I didn't know that there were three people when jane got there and things like that. So it's, it's really inspiring. And I talked to a lot of early stage startups now and they're wrestling with, you know, they wrestle with the same stuff, so I'm pretty sure the audience is going to like it too for the audience. Thank you for listening to the podcast.

If you'd like more details about what we discussed, there will be a blog post for this. Well linked to jane and Colleen's linkedin's than anything else they'd like. And if you want to get updates for future guests, subscribe it, invent like an owner dot com and be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app. That's it for today and remember? No sniveling. Yeah. Mm. Yeah. Mhm. This episode is sponsored by freight era dot com. Frontera is building the low, efficient freight transport marketplace, linking BTB shippers to the most efficient carrier for each route.

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