Skip to main content

Too Much Good

I have been a very happy Amazon customer for more than a decade. Reading about Amazon Prime Air gave me pause. I consult with clients on customer analytics and opportunities to enhance their experience with the product or service. Assuming, Amazon has a significant number of customers like myself who are more than happy to wait 3-5 days for their order to be delivered, clearly the drone service is not meant for us. 

However, when our friends and neighbors start to get their Amazon packages air-dropped, we may feel like a tribe of Luddites that have just failed to keep up with the times. What was once a completely satisfactory customer experience may turn a little less so. It will be like choosing to write letters in longhand instead of using email. As charming as letter writing is, the vast majority of us have transitioned completely to email. That transition was not equally easy or natural for everyone. 

Makes me wonder about what constitutes good customer experience and how its future is shaped. A combination of disruption by the business and a certain niche of the customer population that is eager for it can raise the tide for everyone. Yet with vastly improved service (in this case near real time delivery of an order) cross sections of the customer population may feel dissatisfied or unappreciated. What may be a completely unrelated miss may now be attributed to the new delivery model  these customers were not the target for. Attrition analysis does not often take into account the impact of delivering great features and services that a loyal group of customers had no need for.

Comments

Lekhni said…
I'm not sure how much impact the "cool factor" will have, given that most deliveries are made while everyone is away at work. Maybe college students will use it? Prime Air looks more of a flowers and pizza delivery thing right now.

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...