“Amazon Is Worth More Than Walmart, Costco, and Target Together” If you don’t live in the United States, you can probably still use the top four retailers in your country to replace the brands listed above. It is difficult not to notice that the company is taking the world by storm, despite the fact that Market Cap is as much about looking ahead as it is about current results. Jeff Bezos, the company’s mysterious founder, is now the richest person in the world. However, just like the majority of its contemporaries from the dotcom boom of the early 2000s, Amazon could have easily vanished years ago.
What, then, allowed Amazon to compete against all odds?
First, let’s talk about what wasn’t as significant as most people think. Even though it seems like a good idea now, the concept of selling things online was never unique to Amazon. And if you wanted to establish an online Walmart, why on earth would you begin with books? And how can we explain Amazon’s continued success in everything from a book store to cloud computing, hardware devices, media production, and more?
According to Bezos, the real key to success is as follows:
For the past 18 years, Amazon has pursued three major concepts that have contributed to our success: Prioritize the customer. Invent. Be patient, too.
Let’s go over this in greater detail.
- Put the customer first From the beginning, Amazon claimed to be the “World’s Most Customer-Centric Company.” Although it is debatable whether or not this was ever the case, it was unquestionably a goal that permeated virtually every action that Amazon took. Bezos once more: It will cover a lot of your other mistakes if you truly care about your customers.”
Realizing the distinction between customer service and customer experience, Amazon has made significant investments in both.
On the service front, they make support as simple as possible given their size. Conversations with Amazon customer service representatives are frequently posted online for their humor value, which is unheard of with most retailers.
In terms of experience, Amazon is well-known for launching academic studies via their front page’s speed. It comes as no surprise that Amazon developed the One-Click Checkout method. They keep on improving in the conveyance region, continually presenting new choices that make clients’ life more straightforward. Again, traditional retailers focus more on the products on the shelf and their prices than they do on the shopping experience. Or until Amazon made the industry pay attention, they didn’t.
- Create
I can’t pressure enough how significant paying attention to your clients is in an encounter economy. Customers, on the other hand, will never tell you everything you need to know to succeed. You won’t get the Kindle, Alexa, or EC2 from customers. Customers don’t always realize how much they need the most cutting-edge products until they actually see them in person, or even before that.
This indicated that establishing a culture that is open to innovation was a crucial component for Amazon. They beat a huge industry, but unlike most businesses, they haven’t decided to rest on their laurels.
They continue to release a lot of novel, out-of-the-ordinary new products. Amazon’s secret is that they continue to listen to their customers even when they invent. You use the customers’ reasons and justifications as the foundation for your ideas, even though you don’t act exactly as the customers say. I doubt that any one customer provided Amazon with all the information they required to construct the Kindle. However, they probably were aware that a sizable portion of their clientele valued speed and ease of use more than the characteristics of a printed book.
- Be patient A lot of the aforementioned advice seems to be common sense. It really is not. The majority of businesses you’ll read about say they follow the same principles, but you rarely see them in action, especially at a large scale. Typically, the reason is a lack of long-term vision. If you only consider the upcoming quarter, It seems like a waste of money to invest in innovation and the customer experience.
Amazon has always been like this. That’s why they’ve put money into so many seemingly crazy ideas that are way out of their comfort zone. Along the way, there were numerous failures (Kindle Fire anyone?). However, the company has always achieved sufficient success to make up for those.
Perseverance is the second component of patience. The majority of Amazon products typically appear to be harmless amusements in their initial versions. Some of them change entire industries over time, with a lot of twists and turns.
Your case isn’t different. These businesses frequently assert, “My industry is different; all of this customer experience stuff applies to retail, but not in X.” In some way, telecom, utilities, banking, insurance, and video game companies still believe that they are unique and that their rules are different. Sometimes Amazon itself demonstrates the opposite, and other times one of the newer businesses that adhere to their fundamental principles.
The principles outlined here apply to all industries, which is why Amazon was so successful in a wide range of them. I’m sure I can name a company in your industry that is already competing on customer experience and will soon dominate the field if you don’t start thinking this way, in case you need an excuse.
Alternately, you can rise to the occasion and win your sector by focusing on customer experience; I’d recommend taking the second option.
