Hide and Seek With Amazon

Speaking of defensive design, here’s a real-life situation: a person called our company (!) trying to find customer service phone number at Amazon.com! Imagine that. I was a bit lost how that could happen, so I went to Amazon.com with a hope to help this person and dig out Amazon’s 1-800 number or something. I found jack.

Here’s a challenge for you: imagine Amazon billed your credit card incorrectly. Find a phone number or email of their Customer Support, time your search and report how long it took you. You’d think "the biggest e-commerce store on earth", as some people call it in euphoria (so annoying), would make getting in touch with them easier. :(

By the way, type in customer service phone number in their search box and you get… Magellan RoadMate 700 Vehicle GPS with Windshield Mount! Yay! How exciting. Wait, what about that phone number?

You're right. I gave up after about 5 minutes without a number or email address. That's pathetic.

1-800-201-7575

from: Hard To Find Internet Retailer Phone Numbers

What do I win?

LOL! Brian, good one! I wish I had a gift or something---I would've mailed it to you right away.

All right, folks, let's keep looking at Amazon.com ;)

This is just another case of a large company trying to cut costs. They don't want ton of people calling in asking stupid questions. But the real question is... Does not having easy and available support cause them to lose more customers than the amount of money they are saving?

Since we are talking about Amazon here...why not go ahead and pick something off of my Wish List to send to me for giving the right answer ;)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html/ref=cs_top_nav_wl/104-8569138-3359105?type=wishlist

The Amazon website provides very clear directions on how to contact the company if something goes wrong: and it's always via online feedback form or email. The Help pages (linked from every page of the site) are exhaustive and provide contact avenues for just about every contingency.

Perhaps they could be more up-front about there not being a number to call, but when you're the largest online retailer on earth you do NOT want to be running a toll free number. If that service number were easily available on the site, people would use it to do everything that they should otherwise be doing on the site - checking stock, tracking packages, etc.

The areas for improving defensive design in a situation like this are not in providing the phone number, but in making it clear that there are other avenues of getting customer service and making those easy and effective.

[Disclaimer: I am not employed by or affiliated with Amazon. I have used them many times in the past. And I do know somewhat about running live customer service call centres and the logistics involved.]

Their entire "help" section is nothing but a bunch of static pages with a lot of blah-blah and not a single submission form you use if you truly need help. The person who called me and myself couldn't find anything related to payments (no, advertising their own credit card doesn't count) or any contact emails. Amazon's "help" section is among the lamest I've ever seen.

Slate has written about this at least once.

That's a hilarious article Slate has there. :)