Jeff Bezos once called up his founded company Amazon back in its earlier days to see if things were really running as they should.
The former Amazon CEO shared a story on the Lex Fridman Podcast about how he personally called the company’s customer service to prove a point.
Of course, this was way back in the early days of Amazon before it became the huge e-commerce giant that we know today.
During a weekly business review, Bezos noticed a mismatch between the data and customer feedback.
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"I have a saying which is: when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right," the 60-year-old said.
In this case, metrics showed that customers were waiting less than 60 seconds to reach support, but complaints about long wait times suggested otherwise.
"It's usually not that the data is being miscollected, it's usually that you're not measuring the right thing," Bezos explained.
So Bezos being Bezos decided to take matters into his own hands.
He went straight up to the head of customer service and said: "Let's call."
"I picked up the phone and I dialled the 1800 number and called customer service," the billionaire said with a laugh.
"And we just waited in silence."
When Lex asked what the wait time actually was, Bezos said it turned out to be 'way longer' than expected: "More than 10 minutes I think."
The call, that left Bezos on hold for over 10 uncomfortable minutes, dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection.
He called this an example of 'truth-telling.'
Although this method can be pretty 'uncomfortable' - and not one that would be received well by many employees - Bezos regards it as a powerful way to get people to listen to you and buy into what you're saying.
The YouTube comments were all for Bezos’ approach.
"Imagine sitting in the boardroom waiting in silence for 10min for customer service to pick up after you just told Jeff the data shows it is only 60 seconds and everything is fine lol," the first comment read.
A second user noticed the difference with Amazon's customer service today, writing: "Kind of ironic that, these days, they make it very difficult to interact with a real person."
A third replied: "Amazon’s service has gone WAYYYYYYY down since Bezos stepped aside. I used to buy nearly 95% from Amazon and that has gone down to probably less than 50%. They are not who they used to be."
Another user joked: "Imagine working in the call centre and Jeff rings you himself hahaha".