Like you, I have done business with Amazon.com forever. And generally speaking, I have been very satisfied with their business model. However, that does not mean things have been perfect. I do believe Amazon wants to make every customer happy. However, I am learning of a black hole in their customer care operation they need to fix.
Amazon.com makes it too difficult for a customer to contact them by phone, text or email to discuss a problem. Users can find no phone number or even an icon on a customer service page that will connect you.
Sure, if they send the wrong item, they make it easy to return your order. Just find the proper icon, a few clicks later and you’re done. No contact with a human being. It’s all automated using a kind of AI.
Amazon.com customer support needs improvement
However, what if you ordered two items, paid for two items and only one arrived? You don’t want to return the one you got. However, you want the other one you ordered and paid for.
You check the Amazon.com page and see you ordered two. However, when you go online to find the customer service phone number, there is none. You look for another way to communicate with Amazon. However, you can find no text and no way to send an email to their customer service.
Customer service and customer care should always be front and center. In fact, you are not even sure whether your order came from Amazon or a third-party using the Amazon.com site. You don’t know, and you really don’t care. All you want is to talk with someone to tell your story to and to get the problem solved quickly and easily so you can get back to your life.
Customer care should be front and center
However, the only way to communicate seems to be clicking one of several icons, and none of them are what you want. None of them connect you with a live customer service representative. None of them will clarify the confusion. All you want to do is find out where the other item you already paid for is. But you’re lost.
You sit there for minute after minute, clicking icon after icon, page after page, just looking for someone to help you. However, after wasting so much time you finally choose an icon that is not what you want, and you send a quick message and hope for the best.
Amazon.com customer care needs to improve
Many users complain that this seems to be the current state of customer relations and customer service at Amazon.com. I am not saying they don’t care. I think they do care. The problem is they make it very difficult if not impossible for a customer to get quick resolution to a problem. And that’s what customers want.
This is a real problem for a company that wants to make it quick and easy, not more difficult to shop there. In this area, they are failing. This hurts them with their relationships with many customers.
Other Amazon.com problems
And this is not the only problem. Another is their ordering system. I was shopping for an iPhone cover. I ordered one and was happy, so used my laptop and went online to order another in another color.
I did not complete my order because I wanted to check with my wife who wanted a different color. She wanted to check other options. So, we waited. I forgot all about it. The next day, I used my iPhone to order something else on Amazon and pressed the BUY NOW icon. Two days later it arrived, along with the iPhone cover that I had not wanted to order. Surprise!
The problem was Amazon didn’t give me the option to see what I was buying on the iPhone. They just sent everything on my list. It’s a good thing I wasn’t looking at a new Ferrari, right!
As it turns out, eventually I learned what went wrong. I had ordered two shirts, but the company using Amazon only got an order for one. They shipped the one. They didn’t understand the problem.
The order form page on Amazon screwed up and only registered one, even though we ordered a black and a white. Don’t ask me why. I don’t understand either. However, days later the order form was updated on Amazon a few days later to reflect only one shirt.
That’s good, but that’s not the order. Why was this order changed? We ordered a black and white and we expected both. This is the problem.
Want more? I have coffee at a neighborhood Starbucks and the other day the group was complaining about how often Amazon screws up. One said he was offered free shipping if he would join Prime. So, he did.
Then several months later his wife asked him why Amazon was charging them $10 every month. After spending time investigating they found they were being charged for Prime.
They didn’t want Prime. He said that he did not realize it would be a $10 charge every month going forward. So, they wanted to cancel Prime. He said it was like trying to talk in another language. It took forever.
Don’t get me wrong. I still love Amazon. Just not the same way I used do. I don’t have blind faith in them any longer. Now I am more careful. And I believe everyone should be more careful.
Amazon is still a fast growing and very successful company, but there are still plenty of pot holes in their e-commerce highway. Pot holes that need to be patched or they will hurt both their customers and themselves in the long run.
Just a friendly reminder to Amazon. Your customers still love you, just don’t keep screwing up or that may change. We all understand mistakes happen. However, a brand relationship is a hard thing to build and takes a long time, but it can be destroyed in an instant. Just saying.
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