[ethbro]

Say what you want about Amazon, but they've encultured the best approach I've seen so far.

They constantly try to automate and make things more efficient, but they also assume they will constantly screw up for someone, somewhere, at scale.

So they back it with an empowered human CSR team, who do their best to make customers happy. They then (apparently) measure the rate of screw ups continuously, and iterate on their processes until they can drive that rate close to zero.

So essentially, Bezos realized that the way to excel was to (a) move fast, (b) break things, (c) apologize (and pay painfully!) when you break things, (d) do your best not to break things in the same way again.

I feel like Google (as a whole, some teams / products aside!) doesn't really grok (c).

Which may work for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention.

[tenant]

Amazon actually takes your money and also has competitors (high street etc). I think that partly explains some of the differences in their approach to your point (c). I think that Amazon also delegates a lot of the pain you're talking about onto their employees rather than their bottom line. BTW I speak as a complete hypocrite who is a happy Amazon customer.