What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Amazon. Part 1 : Customer Obsession

The first in my six-part series where I dive into the most valuable things I learned after several years at Amazon, and what this can teach entrepreneurs, CEOs, start-ups and new businesses.

Part 1: Customer Obsession – easy to say, vital for success, tough to do.

More business than I care to count claim to be customer obsessed. Or customer focused. Or customer first. Or customer oriented. The truth is, more often than not, the sentiment is genuine but the reality is different. Any decision that starts with shareholders, profit, competition behaviour, innovation, brand rules, operational process and not the customer, is failing at customer obsession. This is because it is incredibly difficult to continuously and religiously put the customer first.

Amazon has a series of values, also known as leadership principles, which drive company culture through every aspect of the organisation. The first of these is Customer Obsession - leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Publicised in the first shareholders letter in 1997, it’s certainly no secret that this relentless focus on the customer is what drives so much of Amazon’s success. As Jeff Bezos said (Economic Club of Washington, 2018) "The No. 1 thing that has made us successful by far is obsessive compulsive focus on the customer as opposed to obsession over the competitor".

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but this is where I think the biggest gains can be found for effectively integrating a genuine obsession with the customer into your business:

1)      It’s born at the top.

No team can be truly customer obsessed if they aren’t enabled to be so. As CEO, MD, Founder, or a leader, your job is to enable, encourage and insist upon behaviour that centres around the customer.

2)      It takes being bold and making sacrifices.

Insisting upon a focus on the customer before profitability, or shareholder interest is bold and it’s brave. Accepting sunk costs and revising accordingly in the face of a poor customer experience is hard. Switching focus from what your competition is doing in favour of what your customer is doing can be unsettling. This can be particularly challenging for funded start-ups where priority and focus is on achieving profitability. It goes hand in hand with thinking long-term –prioritising the experience your customer has now and the ones they will have in the future.

3)      It takes the right team.

Just as you need to be obsessed, so does your team. The ability to put the customer first is a trait (either natural or learned) that’s essential for everyone to display. Build it into your hiring process – make sure you’re testing for the behaviour, get examples, and understand the lengths to which a candidate has been willing to go to. Incorporate it into employee performance evaluations – continuously assess how well they’re putting the customer first. If an employee is making decisions that don’t put the customer first – understand why. There’s a difference between an employee who doesn’t display this value and one who is in a position where they can’t. Is it actually possible for them to put the customer first? If not, find out where the issue resides and solve it quickly.

4)      It starts and ends with the customer.

Amazon’s method of working backwards from the customer means for every innovation, product, campaign and so on, there’s a document starting with what this means for the customer. This takes the form of a fictional press release written from a date in the future (usually post-launch) that details what’s been done, how it affects customers and what their experience is. Next step is to methodically capture everything that needs to be done in order to achieve that. This exact approach isn’t necessarily for everyone, but by starting with what it means for your customer, you avoid prioritising things because they’re easier, or they’ve always been done a certain way before.

While this can be tough to start with, if you can implement the above and allow these to become a core part of your organisational culture, it will get easier over time and eventually become second nature.

Strategic thinker. Brand builder. Creator. Collaborator. Working with start-ups and entrepreneurs to build brands, create marketing plans and find their point of difference Get in touch to find out how I can help your brilliant ideas meet their potential.

lpaton.com | lauren@lpaton.com