Email jeff@amazon.com. It'll hit the exec support team (even though he's no longer CEO.)
It's aggressively monitored. Jeff himself used to forward prickly ones with a ? to relevant parties, but at the very least, better than front-line support.
I hate it when companies use an "open secret" for important things like support. They're telling customers "Screw you if you're not part of the secret club!". That behavior is fine when you're a child, but for a trillion dollar company to do it just sucks.
Knowing that email address exists makes me less likely to shop with Amazon, and any startup that considers copying it should think very seriously about whether they actually care about their customers. No one should have to email the CEO to fix a basic problem.
But it's not a support trick, it's a "the executive team doesn't want to look embarrassed."
Writing the executive team isn't some trick to get real support, it's something that people figured out you could do and that executives would give vague responses to in order to save face; having seen the end result of a "write the CEO", usually the executive response is just a vague "make this go away", and the "how" of that is left to the imagination of the reader.
Please understand that it's highly doubtful that there is any official policy on what to do with support emails received at the executive level; the end result is that the person who wrote the email gets what they want, but it's not because the executive put any thought into the actual situation, it's because they just wanted an annoying person to go away and wanted to avoid bad PR.
That's all this is, a quick cost-benefit analysis of "what does doing nothing cost me here?" for some executive. For each story you read where writing the executive helps, probably there are a dozen (if not far more) met with radio silence. I've seen customers write the CEO when they were flagrantly and intentionally violating our licensing policy in hopes that the CEO would change something. I've seen them write our product VP because the customer felt they were entitled to salary compensation for the duration while an issue they had with our product was investigated.
Writing the CEO isn't a way to get basic problems fixed, it's a gamble that your particular issue and the circumstances around it are a big enough PR problem that the normal channels of raising concerns aren't enough.
> any startup that considers copying it should think very seriously about whether they actually care about their customers.
Presumably if a startup is copying Amazon it's because of their track record of making money, not their track record of showing they love customers, for the same reason companies aren't copying Google to achieve a bespoke customized nature of services and how they feel tailored to the individual.
That's exactly the point I'm making. Copying Amazon because they make a lot of money, without actually being Amazon and offering the price, range, and radical convenience of Amazon's service, is how a startup fails.
Copying any aspect of a much larger company without properly considering the impact of it on your customers when you're running a very different company is usually a terrible idea, but doing that for support and customer success is extra-terrible.
I would go as far as saying that customer service is not core to Amazon, it's purely a means to an end in some of their businesses. To my knowledge AWS isn't known for their amazing support, but it's entirely possible I'm just ignorant of it.
Not true - one can make a lot of money while being a good citizen. Not a hoard of billions, but quite enough to live comfortably on.
Yes - I slipped 'while' in as a substiutute for 'by'. Arguably the CEO of Oxfam is a 'good citizen' as part of his job, from which he earns millions. So he earns that 'by' being a good citizen. I meant that it's perfectly possible to have a well-paid job that doesn't involve exploiting people or the environment, or generally being a dick. FVSO 'well-paid'.
If 'making a lot of money' means becoming a billionaire, well, I don't think cornering the world's wealth is consistent with being a good citizen.
This also annoys me, and how people don't realize how fragile this solution is. But I think it's like moving your ssh daemon to a random high port: it doesn't change the nature of process, it doesn't provide any guarantees, and it's not the only/last thing you need to do, but it's believed to filter out enough problematic actors that it's worth doing, for both senders and receivers.
(But I get now your complaint isn't about that, and this isn't the best analogy. You're saying that this is a slap in the face to people who don't know that address; they shouldn't be likened to "attackers.")
No, they're telling customers: "If you're savvy enough to likely be able to sue us, we'll offer support."
The "open secret" approach is a high enough bar to filter out 99% of unprofitable support request, but a lower-tier than litigation. Most people will spend time with a search engine before shelling out for a lawyer.
You're thinking about this emotionally, rather than in terms of capitalism.
That's not exactly support though is it, it's just that you don't like their business model. Counterfeits are like half of what they sell these days. Hell that's what amazon basics is.
Amazon gets a cut of every sale even if a 3rd party sells counterfeits. Removing 3rd party sellers and their counterfeits means less revenue in the short term.
This has already happened with "Steve's" email address at Apple, which used to be monitored but is now mostly ignored, I suspect because of the sheer volume of traffic.
Sure, you'll get a response after emailing tcook@apple.com. But there's no guarantee that the customer service peep assigned to you will do anything to help.
I tried this approach when a client was having issues enrolling in Apple Enterprise to distribute an app in-house. Didn't work, took four months until we could release our app.
I secretly hope everyday that a competitor comes along who can produce hardware with a matching level of beauty.
Not sure why any existing hardware maker can't do it. Everyone else is producing plastic boxes of crap. That said I'll never have a mac, that whole mindset is so foreign to me.
I feel like this is extremely well known, at least 8 years ago I whined about the kindle case being shit (causing my screen to crack) and they reached out and got me a replacement
How does that work with the emails he actually needs to receive from his own internal staff though? Having a separate email that he actually uses for daily work ("notjeff@amazon.com")? I can't imagine having my customers and my colleagues bombard me at one email account and effectively staying on top of everything.
When he was actively CEO, he had an entire team devoted to sorting through those emails. They would filter the obvious spam and send the genuine customer complaints directly to him. Which usually led to the infamous question mark emails and a lot of people scrambling to resolve the issue and ensure it remained resolved. (The only time I've seen a question mark email have more than just question mark was when Jeff noticed this was a repeat problem from a previous question mark email.)
I think you'll find that quite a few senior execs don't actually handle their own email inbox. Just as they have an executive assistant to jealously guard their calendar and book all their meetings, someone is actively fielding their emails, dealing with the trivialities and junk, and only escalating the important stuf to the exec's attention.
Adrian Newey (cto of Red Bull Racing F1 team) famously has his emails printed off and then he replies in writing. His assistant types it out the following morning.
ceo's at this level have teams of executive assistants that cover all communications 24x7x365, for personal, work, and government liason. You don't think they actually read their own emails do you?
A former CEO of mine was known for keeping all his emails, forever. For this he needed special email storage arrangements from the IT team, including a laptop with a super-large HD.
If you ever turned up to a meeting and contradicted something you once said in an email, he'd be on to you in an instant.
It's aggressively monitored. Jeff himself used to forward prickly ones with a ? to relevant parties, but at the very least, better than front-line support.