An Amazon’ Crash Course

I appreciate that it may be difficult to picture without sounding outlandish, but try anyway. You were not unlucky to fall on the one incompetent employee on duty that day! This incompetence is by design and serves a very specific purpose that I will explain shortly. For the time being, remind yourself that Amazon is one of the richest and most successful companies in history, whatever your criteria may be. They did not manage that position playing nice. They have some of the smartest minds on their payroll and those can be ruthless. Underestimate Amazon at your own risks. Dismiss them as being silly or incompetent and you may eventually find out the hard way that all along, you were the Amateur; they are the Pros, and you are being played.

But I digress. Amazon has organized its Seller Support in a way that often makes it exceedingly difficult to get answers to somewhat complex questions. You do not have a single point of contact, as thread communications often gets assigned to the next available agent who may have to figure out what the first one intended to do. It is virtually impossible to reach specialist departments, and there is no real escalation mechanism to any level, not even to a litigation department. Meanwhile, if you do not follow-up within 48h yourself (while they can take as long as they wish to answer) your case will be summarily closed and you will need to start over again.

One consequence of this setup is that a problem can very quickly involve several dozen people without anyone being assigned end-to-end responsibility for your issue. Notoriously, Amazon agents work on a quota system with very short response times, and get graded on meeting their objectives. Naturally, temptation must be very strong for them to close those requests as quickly as possible, and they may not hesitate much to pass the hot potato to a colleague, by purposely giving an incomplete answer to which the seller will later respond, with that response being assigned to another agent, more or less competent, more or less willing to read over all the information previously exchanged. Very quickly one can reach an incredible amount of exchanges, up to hundreds of messages, without noticeable progress. It ends up discouraging people who often give up at this point. Specialized discussion forums are filled with frustrated comments from sellers having to deal with under-trained or even plainly incompetent Amazon support workers and talking about how difficult it is to get results through this one interface. With experience, you get to see through that scheme and even sometimes catch agents red handed in their bullshit. The satisfaction is quickly gone, though, as your problem is no more resolved for it.

Meanwhile, notice that this system has achieved one hidden but significant objective: It has naturally, and at very low cost, gotten rid of a good proportion of the more troublesome requests as people simply often give up at this stage, on account of this felt incompetence. But is it really genuine incompetence? The following example, a true story, may help you see things quite differently!