How Jeff Bezos Proved his Leaders Wrong

What type of inheritance will you leave your loved ones? Are you just leaving them paper?

I love this 1-minute video clip by Tim Tebow on what we leave behind for our loved ones.

“Paper ain’t going to change a lot of lives, but purpose is.” –Tim Tebow

Why Customer Experience is Still at Historical Lows

Customer service initially hit rock bottom during the pandemic and right afterward, which was understandable. We had record-high staff shortages and employee turnover due to the great resignations and quiet quitting, supply chain shortages, shrinkflation, and inflation, all resulting in the experience gap—customers paying for more and getting less. Yet years later, overall customer satisfaction is still shockingly horrible.

One theory is the AI race. Organizations have reallocated their budgets to make significant investments in artificial intelligence and automation to enhance customer service, a recent study shows these technological upgrades are having the opposite effect. Surprisingly, rather than improving experiences, consumer satisfaction has sharply declined over the past year, with many customers reporting worse interactions. According to a study by CCW Digital and Customer Management Practice, the majority of US customers reported that their customer experiences have gotten worse.

Employees Are Getting Hired Without Ever Speaking to A Human

According to an article in  The Sunday Times, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is utilizing AI to recruit staff, with candidates not interacting with a human until their first day. AI is employed throughout the entire hiring process for certain junior roles, and a whistleblower has described the system as dysfunctional. While many companies use AI in the initial stages of hiring, candidates for some junior positions at HMRC, such as customer service advisers, communicate exclusively with an automated system. Numerous reviews on Glassdoor highlight how applicants experience the automated HMRC recruitment process without ever speaking to a human.

Wanted…Human Touch

Job applicants are required to send a CV and a 1,000-word statement to a civil-service email address. They then receive a link to a video interview. During this interview, a pre-recorded video of a person appears and asks six questions, to which the applicant records their responses. Adam al-Badry, of the recruiter Robert Half, said: “There are certain elements of AI that are helpful early on in the hiring process to identify suitable candidates, but after that interviews should be done in person or over the phone. In our experience it’s very unusual to have no human interaction at all in the hiring process. A job for a candidate is more than paying the bills. Making sure the culture is right is paramount, and how are you supposed to ascertain that without being able to speak with a real person and ask questions?”

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn HMRC’s customer service has faced significant scrutiny in recent months. A recent National Audit Office report revealed that HMRC failed to answer up to 45 percent of calls to its helpline. Those who managed to get through waited an average of 23 minutes to speak with an adviser. Additionally, 91,000 complaints were lodged against HMRC last year.

*Related – Recruitment and Hiring Strategies: Why it is Time to Create a Recruitment and Hiring Experience

What To Do When Customer Feedback Doesn’t Match Your Reports

Being interviewed on the Lex Fridman Podcast, Jeff Bezos shared this story of how he solved contradicting feedback from what customers were saying and what Amazon’s data was reporting. Back in the day when Jeff Bezos was at the helm of Amazon, he grew frustrated in a meeting when his leaders were showing data that the average customer hold was 1 minute, disputing that the #1 complaint from customer feedback was too long of hold times. Bezos called BS on the data and decided to find out for himself.

“When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right,” Bezos said. It’s usually not that the data is being mis-collected, it’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing.” Bezos then called customer service to see just how long the wait would be. Bezos and his leaders awkwardly waited for an agonizing 10 minutes before being connected to a customer service representation.

“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,” Bezos shared.

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