Amazon apologises for 'threats' to customer | Hacker News Reader

Amazon apologises for 'threats' to customer

bbc.co.uk

74 pointsDanBC23 comments

I often see articles about a tech company delivering an egregiously bad customer experience on HN. I'm sure we all agree that the scenario as presented was a screwup, but I would like to question its relevance. We seem to be passing around such stories as a form of folklore. Why? As a warning to others?

Amazon's a huge company with surely millions of customer interactions a month. Let's assume by now they have adopted a mature supervision process for their CSR interactions. Is this mostly just a random event caused by an unexpected 'bad apple' CSR?

If so, it would suggest the 'error rate' in this type of interaction is really quite low. A customer service cosmic ray, if you will.

Yep. And although there are many bad things you can say about Amazon, they're known for having excellent customer service in general (at least relative to other popular tech companies).

Some customer service stories might exemplify typical interactions (maybe it is really hard to get customer support from Google), but one-off stories such as this one seem more interesting simply as curious tales than as anything that would shape ones opinions of a corporation's service.

It's a hedge against our own mistreatment. If companies see that their customer interactions are visible to the market as a whole, they have more of an incentive to make sure those interactions are good ones.

Well, A) given that the article was from BBC I doubt the HN upvotes were much of a signal boost, and B) would this story have made it to the front page if it were, say, an auto insurance company rather than Amazon?

As bad as this sounds, sometimes I have to wonder what the other guy endured. Don't get me wrong, this is a huge no no, but I wonder what the customer said/did to make the employee feel like this was worth the "get back" knowing full well it could result in termination.

Exactly my thought. While Amazon will not release the specific mitives if any, what was going on in this guy’s brain? Was he mentally ill, like depressed? Although the popular culture took call center into a comedy plot [1], the psychologies of these workers remain depressing I guess.

[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sfaBf3EYYIw

Interesting that they’re calling out the call center operator as Indian. I may be biased because I’ve got a friends who work at the Amazon call centres, but this seems very culturally at odds with what an Indian would do. Death threats, if made, are usually heat of the moment and very passionate - this kind of subtle passive aggressiveness is something I’ve almost never seen here.

Not in my experience. IMO folks there tend to be more culturally ok with passive aggressive behaviors

What is your actual range of experience with "folks there"?

I think they're more calling out the operator as Indian as saying "he's 3k miles away, you were always safe."

That being said, like another commentator, many Asian cultures are very attuned to passive aggressive threats and use those as ways to threaten other people.

EDIT: Also, Amazon is not saying he's an Indian. They just said the employee was in India. I too was guilty, but inferring ethnicity from no facts at all does not help matters.

I've worked with a lot of indian guys in IT. Mostly they are good dudes, but there are definitely assholes too.

Headline sounds worse than it is(edit: by this I mean that it makes it sound like something Amazon the corporate entity did, not a random employee). Rogue Amazon employee used customer data to send him an ominous email advertising books about death. They've since been fired. Amazon offered the customer a 50 GBP gift card as a goodwill gesture.

That sounds incredibly frightening to me

Headline sounds worse than it is?! I would love to have you as a customer! :)

I guess what I meant was that the headline makes it sound like this was something that Amazon the corporate entity did, not a random employee. It could have happened at any company that stores personal customer data.

It's not necessary for a company that stores personal data to expose that data to individual employees. Is there ever a need for a customer service agent to send a manual book recommendation? Does Amazon Customer Service discuss books with customers?

From the perspective of the customer, what is the difference?

FWIW Follow You Home is a really good book!

So someone sends book recommendations and now it's considered death threats.

That's just sad.

It's clear from your comment that you read the article, but I'm very confused about how you ended up with the conclusion that the situation is fine and people are overreacting. I don't know what else to say to this, I hope you can elaborate on your thoughts here.

The book recommendations had pretty specific titles, it wasn't Amazon sending "book recommendations".

You mustn't have read that bit in the article otherwise you wouldn't have made this comment.

I asked Amazon Customer why their “2 day” shipping method is called such when it uses UPS Ground, a 4-7 day shipping service. The response was that they can only guarantee delivery times once the package leaves the Amazon warehouse.

What does that have to do with this article?

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