Weekly Column: 2017-07-28
Amazon’s recent growth is frightening. Particularly, in May of 2017, they acquired Wholefoods Market, an organic food distributor in the US and showed signs of entering the offline market. Of course, we have to wait and see how Amazon’s leap into online and offline will synergize. I wonder what kind of achievements Amazon will achieve and what strategies existing offline retailers, such as Wal-Mart, will have to face.
There must be a lot of reasons why Amazon has become such a huge company, but the key to their success is probably that they maximize customer satisfaction through logistics innovation and make constant efforts to improve their customer experience. They have set minimizing costs for the lowest customer price as a top priority, maximized customer satisfaction with swift delivery, and maximized consumer value to stimulate their online business. It isn’t easy to carry all this out in the long term while minimizing company profit, but Amazon has been able to do it well and succeeded in building the trust of consumers.
As a customer who purchases products through Amazon on a weekly basis, I am very satisfied with how Amazon operates. Most customers who purchase a product or service evaluate their experience, and if they are satisfied, they continue as regular customers and eventually become loyal customers in the future. If they are unsatisfied, rather than complaining, some will quietly go to a third party for their products or services. This means that only a fraction of customers complain, so the ones that do are not the only dissatisfied customers, but we can see this as a number of customers have already left. Depending on how you regard the complaints you receive from your customers, you can improve your service and stop other customers from leaving and have a more successful business in the future.
Amazon has been doing its best to accurately break into this section and raise customer satisfaction. They are able to successfully process customer complaints quickly, do their best to satisfy the customers, and have succeeded in transforming dissatisfied customers into loyal customers by immediately improving the weak points of the products or services. Amazon is well-known for having some of the best customer satisfaction services, and I believe that this is the reason why they were able to grow so large.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, said the following in a lecture. “First invest in the consumer. Focus on the consumer and understand what they want. Then find an optimal way to satisfy this demand at a low price. In this process, innovation arises.”
Through these innovations, Amazon has built consumer confidence, and by meeting their customers’ needs, they have succeeded in becoming the brand that people first think of when they want to purchase something online. The percentage of people who return to Amazon for their purchasing needs is quite high, and as a result, Amazon has secured many loyal customers.
Could Amazon’s strategy of giving priority to consumers and showing them what they do rather than explain to them why they should use Amazon be an example for people wanting to start their own online sales business? If you take in Amazon’s proven advantages to first move the consumers and place customer satisfaction as the highest priority and build consumer trust, it will not be difficult to find success.