The Power of a Question Mark

I recently spent several days with an AWS customer in the banking and financial services industry (FSI). Like many of its peers, this venerated 100-plus-year-old organization is struggling to respond to changes in the market, including dynamic competition, heightened regulatory scrutiny, and a customer base whose loyalty seems to last as long as the next great ad campaign.

This company has done tremendous work to modernize its technology stack, seeking economies of scale, increased automation, more robust and resilient solutions, and a stronger security and regulatory compliance posture.

The CEO believes the organization’s culture is key to its enduring success, but it is optimized for how things worked in the past. He doesn’t want to completely redefine the culture—what they have now largely works. But he believes that one particular aspect of that culture needs to shift; a key part of future-proofing his organization is becoming customer obsessed.

The organization was an early adopter of AWS; its leaders have spent a lot of time with Amazonians, who tend to be passionate about the company culture. The CEO latched onto AWS’s idea of customer obsession and invited me to spend time with his team and share how AWS brings customer obsession to life.

AWS has a long history of working with enterprises in the FSI sector and understands the business and pressures those enterprises face. But AWS isn’t an FSI enterprise, and it doesn’t presume that organizations should adopt its definition of customer obsession (or any other part of AWS culture).

Here’s the Amazon Leadership Principle definition:

Customer Obsession – Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Obsession is an interesting word choice. Why not “customer focus” or “customer-centric” (which is the term used in Amazon’s mission statement)? Obsession isn’t usually a positive term—if you keep bringing up narwhals in every conversation, we might say there’s something wrong with you! And, yet AWS thinks it’s the perfect word to describe how often the customer should show up in our thinking.

“Leaders start with the customer and work backwards.” Many organizations begin by looking at their capabilities. They decide what they can build, find an addressable market for that product, and seek customers who might want it. That can be a successful approach to business.

But AWS starts by understanding its customers and then works backwards from their needs to identify solutions. AWS avoids generalities; specific customer needs often require nonintuitive answers that can lead to surprising directions. It’s how Amazon moved from selling books to building LEO satellites. Stretching capabilities and solving customer problems builds trust and long-term customer relationships.

“They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust.” AWS is a big company that builds products and launches services for global enterprises. Amazonians are talented and smart, and AWS technology continually defines the state of the art. But one of AWS’s most precious resources is customer trust. As Amazonians go about their daily work, they are responsible for examining their actions and asking, “Will this action build or erode customer trust?”

“Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.” Of course, AWS needs to pay attention to what the competition is doing. There are a lot of really smart people who don’t work here—it would be foolish to ignore them! But action should never be a reaction to what a competitor is doing. Too much focus on the competition would leave us several steps behind true customer needs.

Your Version of Customer Obsession

I encouraged the FSI organization’s leaders and team members to (1) think about the mental models they wanted to construct and (2) identify the unspoken mental models likely to undermine their transformation efforts. Articulated mental models like Amazon’s Leadership Principles make cultural expectations explicit. The Amazonian definition of customer obsession is precise, concise, and relatable. It’s right for AWS, but every organization should craft its own useful definition. Copying another company’s principles is like strapping a horn to a beluga whale and calling it a narwhal.

Your version of customer obsession should fit your context and customers. But getting the words right is not enough. If you want your organization to become customer obsessed, your senior leadership needs to model customer obsession beyond an inspiring speech at the company meeting. It needs to be lived daily.

The Question Mark

Like many organizations, AWS has developed all kinds of metrics to gain insight into customer experience and sentiment. Leaders communicate the importance of customer focus to their teams by regularly reviewing these metrics alongside other critical business metrics. But there’s one mechanism Jeff Bezos employed that moves out of the realm of customer focus into obsession: the question mark.

Jeff modeled customer obsession by reading customer emails. His email address was jeff@amazon.com (don’t try it now—he doesn’t work here anymore). He got a lot of customer emails. As the company grew, the volume increased, so he trained people on his team to look for anomalies—real customer experiences that contradicted the data.

Jeff would then take that individual customer email, add a single question mark to the top, and forward it to the team responsible for that part of the customer experience.

Work would stop. That team’s top priority became understanding what happened, owning the fix, and getting back to Jeff. More often than not, the investigation led to a new insight or revealed a flaw in metrics. Many customers often experienced the same issue, which would have gone unaddressed without Jeff’s question mark email.

Customer behavior data is really useful. The more data you have, the more accurate your predictions are, and the more certain you can be that your actions have an impact. But mountains of data can create a false sense of security. Jeff’s practice of reading individual customer emails helped identify blind spots and modeled customer obsession for the whole organization.

Articulating your mental models has power. But mental models need supporting mechanisms to come alive. Jeff’s question mark was one of many ways Amazon embodied customer obsession.

How will you make it real in your context?

Some ideas for you …unless you know better ones.

—Stephen