With the recent almost 8% rise in Amazon stock and Jeff Bezos holding around 80 Million shares, his net worth on paper has jumped to over 90 Billion, placing him well ahead of Bill Gates.
Phenomenal right? But let’s rewind the Amazon story and see how Jeff got here.
Remember 1998? While we danced to “Crush’ from Jennifer Page and sung along to Aerosmith’s “I don’t want to miss a thing,” Jeff had started building his empire.
He started with selling books online and now, wants to sell everything online.
Despite the skeptics and naysayers on his back, he continued his quest to build his business and kept re-investing in infrastructure and tweaking Amazon’s customer experience to make it simply amazing.
To put it in a nutshell, it is his obsession with playing the long game and providing exceptional value to customers which has got him to where he is today.
In his letters to shareholders (which are a great read btw) he talks about his philosophy which he calls ‘Day 1.’
I’ve distilled it to 3 key things:
1. Being obsessed with your customers
2. Being an early adopter of trends
3. High-velocity decision making
Here’s a small except from his one of his letters:
“There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here's the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great."
Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight.
A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.”
Picking up on the ‘being obsessed with your customers’ bit, in an age where everyone looks for instant gratification and quick wins, we need to step back and see the true value of playing the long game.
We need to have patience, perseverance and a deep commitment to creating amazing customer experiences.
Placing customers at core of your decision making is paramount in creating a true customer centric brand. Quite simply, without customers you don’t have a business!
Creating amazing value add for your customers creates ultra-loyalty and makes them less likely to jump over to the competition, which is so easy today given the myriad choices of products and services.
So, are you playing the long game and making customer experience your top priority? You should.
About the author
Ashok Miranda is a Business Transformation Architect and founder of Transform and Transcend. He is the author of the book: Culling Culturitis, How To Rid Your Company of this Toxic Disease and Build a Winning Company Culture.
As a speaker, consultant and trainer, he is passionately committed to architecting a better business world by building purpose-driven companies that nurture happy and engaged employees and positively impact peoples lives.
He connects the dots between company culture, branding, marketing and customer experience and works with business leaders, owners, founders and HR professionals to transform their companies for success in the digital age.
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