Kill'em with kindness

Here's a story we just published about Amazon being rated the best company for customer service.

Eons ago, when I was working my way through college in the service industry, management taught us a golden rule: "Kill them with kindness." In other words, treat the customer with such respect and such a high level of service that they can't help but be won over to your side.

Easy to say. Harder to do.

But any retailer hoping to succeed in the new world order might want to learn from the example being set by Amazon.

This is a company that apparently has told its service staff to make customers, especially good customers, happy--at almost any price.

I've been an Amazon Prime customer for several years now, and my relationship with the company continues to grow.

When it comes to shopping, "relationship" is a term I don't throw around lightly. But Amazon has won that through consistently exceeding my expectations.

The most recent was for an order I placed two weeks ago. I'm a pretty thorough analyst of information before I buy. But in this case, I placed my order for a relatively cheap item based mainly on the accompanying photo.

When the product arrived, it wasn't what had been represented in the picture. So I set out to return it using Amazon's simple and friendly return system, which I've come to have full confidence in. But when I began, the system simply responded that I should keep the product free of charge anyway. What?!

Even to a pretty seasoned consumer, that one was a shocker. But as I mulled it over and over throughout the remainder of the day--"how.......what.......is it possible.......what the........."--I finally realized it wasn't shocking at all. In fact, Amazon has responded positively, beyond expectations, for most service interactions I've had with it.

And because I shop there a lot, thats a fairly large body of evidence.

But I'll tell you right now, that I'm a huge Amazon fan. I mean, it's not that I spend my personal life trying to figure out whether I like certain retailers or not. Fact is, I just love Amazon.

So I recently bought two Kindles as gifts. One of them was a Fire, and I bought it instead of an iPad, regardless of how highly I also think of Apple.

Good service. Kill'em with kindness. Go figure.