Customer obsessed and company values

I happened to meet a person from Amazon.com this week and when I was introduced to him and I said, "I'm a customer" the first thing out of his mouth was, "Are you happy?  Are we doing a good job?"  I love that, especially since it was pretty far from his job description to care about individual customers.  (Or so I thought)

I'm a big amazon.com fan.  It seems like they are always innovating and everything they do seems to be designed to make it easier for the customer.  I made my first amazon.com purchase in September of 1996 - ten years ago - and in that time I've had two problems, and both were resolved not just to my satisfaction but each resolution exceeded my expectations.

A few years ago I bought a Wise Crackin' Shrek and Wise Crackin' Donkey from amazon.com.  (They do speech recognition - it's my job to understand this stuff.)  Donkey was fine, but Shrek was stuck in demo mode.  On Saturday I went to the amazon.com website and filled out a return request page.  On Sunday I discovered an email saying that a new Shrek was being shipped on Monday to me, and that I should return the broken Shrek, postage paid by amazon.  The new Shrek arrived on Tuesday as promised.  I became an even bigger fan.

Thinking about my new amazon friend I did a little poking around on the website and found the company values.  Sure enough, number one is Customer Obsession, and number four is Ownership.  This person definitely fits the values.  If you are a skeptic about the idea of company values, like I was once, think of it like this.  Company values are the basic characteristics that you look for when you hire a new person.  The person's character really.  And sometimes they are the characteristics that force you to fire a person.  If you find yourself saying, "they just didn't fit" then it was probably a values mismatch.

Jim Collins writes about core values in Built to Last, which of course is a bestseller on amazon.com.  I see that he also now has a great selection of mp3s available on his website, including one one titled "Getting Back to Values and Other Lessons on IBM."

Disclaimer:  Years ago I bought a few shares of amazon.com for my IRA, but that's not why I'm writing this.  Also if you buy anything I've linked to on the amazon.com website, I make a dollar or two, but trust me that doesn't even pay my monthly hosting bill.  I just really admire the company and it was fun to meet someone who works there and who really is customer obsessed.

Update One  This is what I'm talking about.  I just checked to see if I had the link to Built to Last correct, and I noticed something new.  For some time, amazon has made it possible to view pages from a lot of the books they sell, but you could only view excerpts.  Here's what I saw today:

Online books?  What online books?  It turns out that I have nine books that I've purchased in the past that can be upgraded to "read online."  The price to upgrade ranges from $2.49 to $10.59.  What's really interesting is that of the seven books, four are by local authors Jana Matthews, Richard Hackathorn and Theresa Szczurek.  Cool!