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Comment by oidar | Hacker News Reader

Do I have to be a reporter with a major news outlet to get decent customer service? I've been having a reoccurring problem with Amazon that I've failed to get resolved with the online/phone/email customer service and I'm at my wits end. Amazon packaging insists on packing heavy bulky items (like a multi-pack carton of liquids) with delicate items resulting in the delicate items being damaged. It's clearly a packing problem, but there is no way for the customer service agents to annotate this in the packing system. I'm so tired of dealing with Amazon and trying to figure out the best way to get issues resolved with them. It's always refunded, but that doesn't fix the issue - I want it to stop happening and spending my time dealing with it.

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> email customer service

Did you try reaching out to executive customer relations, either through ajassy@amazon.com or jeff@amazon.com? (FWIW Jeff's address still works despite him stepping down 2 years ago)

Always had a very quick response and resolution whenever I had an issue that was beyond the ability of "normal" customer service to resolve.

I'd strongly suggest ^

This approach is incredibly effective, and will almost certainly guarantee one of the infamous "question mark" emails gets sent out. There's a whole process built around question mark emails that drags in a bunch of senior staff to ensure things get resolved.

You can read about it here: https://www.inc.com/business-insider/amazon-founder-ceo-jeff...

I've been on the receiving end of an ajassy question mark email once. That was an interesting way to spend a few days. The customer was complaining about slow uploads to the aws service I worked on. All I had to go from was their country, via some guesswork. They did at least mention which region it was they were having issues with.

It took a bit of effort but I was able to prove from service logs, to a reasonable degree, that the problem was with their ISP. All I had to go from was what country they were in, didn't know their ISP, which added to the fun.

Effective because so few do it. It’s just not scalable.

When you publicly proclaim yourself the "World's Supermarket," scalability arguments fall flat. If you conduct twelve figures' worth of business per annum, you can afford to answer your phone.

You can also afford yo noy answer your phone. This is the problem.

Maybe not, but claiming that you work for a news organization when someone attempts to lazy their way out of making a business deal right is an easy way to get the service you should have received in the first place.

I was in the middle of getting scammed by a company out of Lithuania when I mentioned that I was going to turn this information over to a reporter at a company I work for, and the tone of the CS person changed from "I can't help you" to "yes, we will give you an immediate and complete refund."

This happens to me basically everywhere. Recently, $300 of crap from Target soaked in laundry detergent. Usually the amounts are small enough that they say not to return the items - I pay the cleaning price and at least most of the stuff doesn't go to waste. But this time they wanted it all sent back, so have fun with that (and they wouldn't even cross-ship). It still boggles my mind how they're able to waste so much stuff and lose so much money seemingly without care.

The only mitigation I've found is to make multiple orders separating out heavy/bulky/liquid/light/fragile items, shipping cutoffs permitting. But of course this is less likely to work with Amazon where they coalesce different orders. (The latest incident was due to forgetting to do this, which should be their job, for them)

Use a different company.

Order them one hour apart

Amazon often combines separate orders for shipping so this approach wouldn't work unless you waited for the first order to ship before placing the second.

I've always hoped they would do this but haven't been able to get them to even when I try. Like, going out of my way to select "Amazon day delivery" nearly a week out, and separate orders within a day of each other still come separately or even on different days.

I'm sure it just comes down to what's available in what distribution centers, how big the order backlog is, Prime status, etc. The algorithm that makes those decisions would be fascinating to study.

They won’t do it if you ship to a different name at the same address.

Why should I have to?

If you don’t then we arrive at yet another scenario in life where no one learns anything.

Same issue multiple times. I recently got an SD card with no protection delivered in the same box as 2 heavy 12-packs of canned drinks. Could barely find the card in the box.

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