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.