Building Amazon’s Customer Service Organization | Colleen Byrum & Jane Slade

Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Colleen Byrum and Jane Slade. The discussion surrounds how the Customer Service team wasn't just the people in the Customer Service department, but everyone who joins the company. In the early days, almost all employees got trained in Customer Service support, even engineers and SVPs!

Jane Slade, former director of Customer Service Strategy - Customer Experience, Product Development, Finance, and Operations. Colleen Byrum, former director of Customer Service and former VP for Amazon.de and Amazon.co.uk. Recently, both were working at Freightera.

Episode Resources:

• Colleen Byrum’s LinkedIn
• Jane Slade’s LinkedIn
• Freightera Freight Marketplace
• Subscribe to our Newsletter
• Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 02:03 What customer service support was like in the early days
• 04:09 Varying questions from Amazon’s early adaptors
• 05:58 Training for customer support was done basically side by side
• 06:57 Mid-May 1996 was the first flood of customers
• 08:40 Early customer support was phone-only before email became dominant
• 09:45 Jeff Bezos liked to hire smart people (advanced degrees were a good proxy)
• 12:00 The number one Customer Service question
• 12:32 What happened after the Wall Street Journal surge?
• 19:04 Jeff looked for intuitive qualities in people
• 20:57 Massive search to fill up shortage in Customer Service headcount
• 22:50 Amazon Customer Service support scaling up
• 25:33 Third party CS software could not keep up with the existing volume
• 29:15 Customers call because something went wrong
• 31:43 Figuring out which orders should go first
• 34:48 Key metrics in sending and tracking orders
• 36:18 Hands are full during Christmas and people are being sent to distribution centers
• 39:11 Customer Service is an incubator for other jobs in Amazon
• 40:32 Working around very small vendors for books
• 42:47 What’s the most memorable online complaint?
• 44:07 CS lessons for startup companies