Amazon: Epic Fail or Just a Glitch? The Failure of Scripted Contact Centers (original) (raw)

So, I first got wind of this when my sister said that Amazon was stripping the sales ranks of GLBT books. I really don't like jumping on outrage bandwagons before getting all the facts, so I did a little digging and found some interesting things.

First, an author of a GLBT book noticed that the sales rankings had been stripped from his book. When he asked Amazon about it, they responded with:

> In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature. > > Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us. > > Best regards, > > Ashlyn D > Member Services > Amazon.com Advantage

It turned out that this "exclusion" affected a huge number of books. It also turned out that this had been going on since at least February, when author Craig Seymour encountered the same issue. He posted a timeline of his contacts with Amazon regarding the issue of his missing sales ranks, along with quotes from customer service's emails.

Well, when this hit the social mediasphere, all hell broke loose. #amazonfail is a popular hashtag right now on Twitter, and a Facebook protest page has been set up. Meanwhile, Amazon has stated that it's "a glitch," and they're working to resolve the issue. (Meanwhile... #glitchmyass.)

Jezebel.com has a great roundup of all the #amazonfail madness, and is now up to ten updates on this story.

So, what the hell happened?

Speculation ahead!

Conspiracy theories abound, but I find it extremely hard to believe that a company like Amazon would commit public relations suicide this way. It just doesn't seem to be their style. I might be wrong, of course, but let me offer another suggestion.

My last job was in a customer contact center. We were the outsourced contact center for companies like Bissel, Michelin, Toro Power Equipment and Ocean Spray. Each of these companies had a specific set of rules on how their customers' phone calls and emails were to be handled. Therefore, we had scripts for a lot of what we did.

When a customer emailed us with a problem about Problem A, we would look that up in the manual. If they had Problem A, we sent out Email A. If they called us about a problem with Widget B, we read them the response right out of the manual: Response B. When they wrote to us with a question, we wrote back a letter with Reply C.

Almost every question was listed in these manuals. It was only when a customer contacted us with a really novel problem, or when they were super angry, that we could deviate from the script. Our job was to look for keywords (like "billing," or "broken," or "shipping") and give the appropriate response. If we deviated from this script, we were penalized. Actually trying to SOLVE the customer's problem was not encouraged - we were rewarded only for following the script to the letter and following the policy down to the dot. No more, no less. (I should point out that not every company was like this. Most of them were, however.)

So, let's look at the response that our first author got from Ashlyn. He asked why his sales rankings were removed. The rep went into the system and saw that the book had had its sales rankings removed. The rep knows from her training that adult books don't carry sales rankings, so she just sends out "adult materials/sales ranking" response A. Done! She moves onto the next email.

And how about the responses that Craig Seymour got from Amazon? Let's look at one of them. He had emailed them asking why the sales ranking had been removed from his book. He got the following response:

> Hello from Amazon.com. > > While we do display a sales rank for each item on its detail page, Amazon does not disclose the actual quantity of items that have sold. The sales rank is a relative measure that tells you how each item is selling in comparison to other items. > > Please contact your publisher for specific details regarding the sales of your book. > > Thanks for contacting us at Amazon.com. > > Best regards, > > Gajalakshmi S. > Amazon.com > We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company

That didn't answer his question AT ALL, but it's a classic example of a contact center response. The rep saw he was asking about sales rankings. The rep stopped reading, sent "Sales Ranks Response C" and moved onto the next email. Your productivity is measured by how many emails you can process in an hour; if you can scan them quickly to get the gist, you can make your quota. Sometimes you miss things. Oh well.

If the contact center rewarded its reps for actually solving people's problems rather than the sheer number they can get through in an hour, I have a feeling this would have been prevented. The emails show that Amazon researched the issue, realized that the book had been classified as "adult," and that's why it wasn't being listed. No further contact was made on the issue. It was most likely never passed on to any tech support people (why is this being marked as "adult?") and thus more books were affected by the same problem.

Almost a month later, his sales rankings reappear, and everything's back to normal.

Had the rep been able to respond intelligently (like being able to ask "So, *is* your book adult in nature?"), this problem might have made it past customer service and onto someone who might have been able to fix it.

Again, that's all speculation. I know Amazon outsources some of their contacts, but I don't know how much. But I would bet money that wherever their contact center is, the representatives have scripts, and those scripts played a huge part in his mess.

Lesson? Companies, please let your reps communicate with your customers in an intelligent manner. Don't reward speed. Instead, reward the reps who can make your customers happy.

And now it's up to their public relations team...

But now Amazon has a real mess to clean up. First they have to fix the sales ranks on their webpage. Then they have to - somehow - convince their customers that they didn't mean to censor the books. The scripted emails from their reps have basically shot the bottom out of their "it's a glitch" response. Everyone is pointing at the response that Mark Probst got that started this whole firestorm. The customer service rep, who was just following her script and doing her job, ended up doing a huge amount of damage to Amazon, and undermined any possible response that Amazon could have come up with to this. "It's a glitch" isn't flying with the angry mob right now; their PR team is going to have to do some fancy footwork on this one.

I'm going to be really interested to see their news release tomorrow morning explaining what happened.