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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.")
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.
I've emailed this address with problems about scammers and counterfeits on Amazon and never received replies.
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.
Completely killed any esteem I had for Apple.
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.
Just trying to get my package...
(p.s. tried all the regular support channels)