Jeff Bezos once proved a valuable point to staff by calling Amazon customer service during meeting

As much as we love the convenience of shopping online, the struggle to reach customer care in case of delays or discrepancies is frustrating. Many a time, people have to wait on hold for several minutes or even hours for a customer service staff to get to them. So when the founder and former CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos started receiving several complaints about his company's customer service, he decided to address the same with his staff. During an appearance on the Lex Fridman Podcast, Bezos recounted how he made an "uncomfortable" phone call during an internal meeting to give his staff member a reality check.

For the world-renowned entrepreneur, sometimes, the best results are all about anecdotes over data. "I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right," Bezos told the podcast host. But he didn't mean that one should "slavishly" follow the anecdotes. "It means you go examine the data. It's usually not that the data is being mis-collected, it's usually that you're not measuring the right thing," the founder said. Bezos liked to apply this belief to customer complaints too. For instance, if a business attracts many complaints from customers but the performance metrics tell otherwise, one should doubt the metrics and always believe the customer.

Explaining this perspective, Bezos proceeded to recall the time when his staff member argued based on data rather than anecdotes. When Amazon was just a budding business, the founder had to prove a point to one of their staff. At that time, the business metrics revealed that customers were waiting for less than 60 seconds to connect to a customer service operator through the 1-800 number. "The wait time was supposed to be less than 60 seconds. But we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that. And anecdotally it seemed longer than that," Bezos explained.

The founder guessed that the customer complaints were legitimate and the metrics needed to be reconsidered. "One day, we're in a meeting and we're going through the weekly business review. We get to this metric in the deck and the guy who leads customer service is to fit in the metric," Bezos said. Questioning the authenticity of the data, the entrepreneur decided to make a customer service call right there. "I dialed the 1-800 number, called customer service and we just waited in silence," he added. Turns out, the founder himself had to wait for more than 10 minutes for a customer service operator to respond.

That's how Bezos "dramatically" made a point to the staff member who claimed that things were going well based on the "metrics." The founder explained, "We weren't measuring the right thing. And that set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right." Though the situation may have been uncomfortable for the staff member, the founder felt he had to do it to bring a shift to their business processes. "That's an example of how truth-telling is an uncomfortable thing to do. You have to seek truth even when it's uncomfortable and you have to get people's attention and they have to buy into it and they have to get energized around really fixing things," Bezos stated. This "uncomfortable" lesson might be an eye-opener for businesses that solely rely on data or metrics without analyzing their credibility.