Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

There is a famous story about Customer Obsession and returns that I used to tell during training sessions for new Amazon employees- Customer Obsession 101, which I was a teacher for.

Jeff is in a call center for a day shadowing a customer support agent. A customer calls about a specific item and the CS agent is like "They're going to say it's broken in this particular manner" before the call even starts. Jeff later is like "How did you know?" and the agent says "Because this is like the tenth time I've had calls about this". There was some problem in the warehouse that kept breaking the item in the same way, but what can a CS agent do about that? File a ticket that no one reads?

So Amazon introduced an 'Andon button' that let CS agents stop sales of a given product if they keep seeing the same problem. Customer Obsession! Crazy idea to empower entry-level people to have such impact! Only Amazon would do something like that!

Anyways, that Amazon is dead, "Day 1" is long gone, and unless the item is a standard product of low value I personally do not shop there anymore.

Agree. "Day 1" is no more, as are those leadership principles.

My own divorce from Amazon retail was when 3rd party vendors had no control over Amazon binning fake goods alongside vendors' non-fakes goods. This ensured that reputation of 3rd party vendors would suffer. Where did the fake goods come from? Were they supplied by Amazon? Perhaps yes, actually.

It makes consumer anti-trust lawsuits [1][2] even more necessary, to ensure protections against monopolies.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/amazon-loses-bid-toss-consumer...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/11xyfem/was...

> So Amazon introduced an 'Andon button'

Maybe my brain is just having trouble parsing it, but what does “Andon” mean?

probably typo for Abandon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andon_(manufacturing)

It's a term borrowed from assembly lines(0), where if the andon cord is pulled, the entire line stops until some manager or the likes inspects and restarts it. For amazon, the equivalent would be pulling the listing immediately from the website, blocking orders and flagging the item for immediate review.

(0): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andon_(manufacturing)

Ah but not an acronym like SCRAM for example in the early nuclear reactor days. Meaning: Start Cutting Right Away Man, because back then, you had to cut the ropes holding up the control rods, which basically mean, shut it down as fast as possible by dropping those rods.

It's a Japanese loan word. I was mystified the first time I heard it out loud in Seattle back in 2015. I don't think I've ever seen it written.

Working in the trust and safety / bad actors space, I imagine that bad actors realized fairly quickly they could just purchase 20 of their competitors products and then rate/write in saying they were damaged / fraudulent and trigger that andon button being falsely triggered.

Add in some pretty basic filters & I think I'd be game to try. Is the complaint from someone >X years active? Is the complaint from someone with >$Y dollars spent?

I can imagine a lot of factors that could go into discerning customer reliability, but there's some pretty blunt force ways to cut out a ton of noise really quick.

And... Amazon should have some pretty clear smoking gun evidence in these cases of updating product listings, with pretty heavily revised listings that should show the issue. If people are mis-reporting, I feel like that too would be kind of hard to hide.

> I can imagine a lot of factors that could go into discerning customer reliability

This just makes hacking Amazon accounts a higher priority

"this just makes" is in general too dismissive for my tastes.

the specific suggestion that rather than just try to game Amazon scammers are all of a sudden going to start en-mass engaging in serious felonies, become a new legion of ultra-vicious hackers, to write fake negative reviews against other people's product is, specifically, not ranked on my oh no, heavens forbid we try that list.

my starting place would only be that, a starting place, but I have a hard time envisioning trying turning into the world burning, as this stance presents. philosophically i have affinity for trying engaging & learning, & yeah sometimes it can be naive or have bad Co sequences. but it feels like we've become attuned to being short, to being disbelievers, to rejecting the try, to always having some scenario in our pocket that seems so awful we scare off attempts. i hope for greater for our society, for people.

Actually, the Andon system still exists. I've worked for an Amazon seller and I've seen plenty of Andon-related error messages.

And once a fraudster finds out they set a troll army to the task of calling in complaints against their competitors' products.

That's not an actual scenario. Customer service can see if the person purchased the product or not. Getting a "troll army" to all buy and return products and call in complaints on actual purchases while waiting on refunds is a much higher bar.

I am intrigued that such a button is superior to having someone read the tickets.

Andon is a manufacturing concept. It’s a button that, when triggered, stops the manufacturing line. You push it when things are systemically broken, and it has massive consequences because it costs companies meaningful cash.

I can’t see how disabling sales of a single product is equivalent either.

I heard Jeff tell this story and it was about a dining table that often arrived with a gouge in the top surface. It was costing Amazon a lot to ship, and a lot to get it returned, and the table was essentially worthless when returned. Even if only 5% of the tables are returned, this makes selling this table a loss maker. Quickest way to increase profits -- stop doing things that make you a loss!

So the lesson from the anecdote is that Amazon wasn't actually Obsessed with the Customer, but maximizing profit, and in this case they just happened to align.

Making customers happy isn't totally orthogonal to making money right?

In midwit meme format:

Low wit: Make customers happy. Making customers happy is how you sell products and win customers from competitors

Midwit: Screw over customers for profit. Customers are kind of low information though right? Maybe we can do things that increase profits at the expense of the customer if the customer wont notice or attribute it to us

High wit: Make customers happy. While an individual customer is low information, in aggregate, doing these things causes a company's reputation to suffer a death by a thousand cuts.

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