'But Wait, You Promised ...'

Originally, the options were in that order. If someone simply tabbed from option to option, he would click, "Forgot your password?" -- even when what he wanted to do was sign in. Because of that single, irritated email, the ordering page was changed.

Again, though, the head of customer service at any big company could tick off customer suggestions that have drifted up and changed products and operations.

But at amazon, the notion of customer service as R&D isn't a slogan, it's a structure -- an unavoidable force to be reckoned with. Price's division includes a group that does nothing but analyze and anticipate problems and cook up solutions. Indeed, representatives from customer-service project management sit on all launch teams as "the voice of the customer."

The ethic cuts deeper than it would first appear. "You can have a great overall culture," says Price, "with real empathy for the customer and passion for fixing the problems. You can have individual reps who say, 'This customer is really upset, and I have to deal with it.' I think we do that.

"What's missing almost everywhere else is, even if you have the empathy and the passion and you address the customer's problem, you haven't really given good customer service in total. You haven't done that until you have eliminated the problem that caused her to call in the first place." Exactly.

It is, frankly, easy to be skeptical of all of this. For such a strategy to work, the entire company has to bend to it. One incident (of many that I encountered) shows how deeply ingrained the attitude is.

The problem materialized during the 1999 Christmas season, the first Christmas that amazon sold toys. Almost as soon as the selling season began, the company received complaints that were notable more for the level of outrage than for the actual number of problems.

Some toys were big enough to be shipped in their original packing boxes. "They were arriving on people's doorsteps, and the people called and said, 'Hey, we weren't expecting this to look like a Big Wheel. My kid came home from school and found his present! Now I gotta buy another one!' " says Janet Savage, 31, who was a customer-service manager that Christmas. This quickly became known as the Big Wheel problem, and it was Savage's job to resolve it.

It was an interesting moment. One possible response -- a perfectly reasonable response -- would be to start warning customers about items shipped in original cartons. After all, if you buy something at Toys 'R' Us, you don't complain that it comes wrapped as what it is.

That response was never considered at amazon. Savage simply started looking for durable, inexpensive wrapping material that would be available immediately and in large quantities. "Our customers were not happy," says Savage. "It was not acceptable to tell parents, Oh well, too bad."

She found rolls of plastic material like the type used in big garbage bags, and amazon started overwrapping every large toy and a selection of electronics items that were likely to be Christmas gifts. How urgent was it? "I bugged people about it on an hourly basis until we got it resolved," says Savage. "You're either Santa Claus or you're not."

Great Service: Back to the Future

I have a running argument with customer-service experts that may be mostly an argument on my side. It is neatly summed up by One to One guru Don Peppers. He offers two key points about service. First, "Service is bad because it's hard to do." Second, "The secret to good service, really, is to treat your customer like you'd like to be treated yourself." Somewhere between point one and point two, I missed the hard part.

The hard part is not the service. The hard part is everything but the service. The hard part is how companies think about what they are doing and how they behave as a result. Why is the service of airlines so bad? Simple: Airlines don't think of themselves as service organizations. Airlines think of themselves as factories that manufacture revenue-seat miles. Airlines have been tuned in to the efficiency of their manufacturing operations, not to the quality of the journey that they provide.

When you spend weeks talking to people about customer service, when you visit people who do it as their livelihood, it is easy to become consumed with the challenges, the technology, and the measurements that obsess the world of customer service.

How much cheaper is it to deliver balances by automated phone menu than through a service rep? How much cheaper is it to deliver balances on the Web than over the telephone? What do people want to talk to a person about? What do they want to do themselves?

How do you create customer satisfaction, customer delight, and customer ecstasy? Most of those questions miss the larger point.