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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has revealed he once personally dialled the company’s customer service helpline during a leadership meeting.
He said he waited over ten minutes on the line, as he questioned the accuracy of internal performance data and eventually lead to changes to how the business measured customer service efficiency.
Speaking on the Lex Fridman Podcast, the 61-year-old former CEO explained the motivation behind the decision. At the time, Amazon’s data suggested customer service response times were under 60 seconds. Yet a growing volume of customer complaints indicated a far different experience.
“When the data and the anecdotes disagree,” Bezos said, “the anecdotes are usually right.”
Customer services call revealed faulty data
The call, made during a live internal review session, was prompted by an apparent mismatch between what Amazon's dashboards were reporting and what customers were experiencing.
Bezos described a meeting in which senior staff reviewed service metrics indicating rapid response times. Despite these figures, a consistent stream of complaints suggested that callers were in fact waiting much longer.
To demonstrate the disconnect, Bezos took out his phone and dialled Amazon’s 1-800 customer service number in front of the team. He recalled the room falling silent as the group listened and waited.
More than ten minutes passed before the call was answered.
“It dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection,” Bezos said. “We weren’t measuring the right thing.”
Bezos call prompts overhaul of performance metrics
The unexpected delay triggered what Bezos called a “chain of events” to investigate and correct the discrepancy. It also illustrated a broader point for leaders in customer-facing organisations: metrics can sometimes fail to capture real-world experiences.
For Bezos, it demonstrated the need to interrogate data when it doesn’t align with feedback from customers.
“You have to seek truth, even when it’s uncomfortable,” he said, adding that taking visible action helps teams engage with problems more seriously. “You have to get people's attention, and they have to buy into it. They have to get energised around really fixing things.”
Amazon’s customer services operations, among the most scaled globally, rely heavily on internal performance data to measure effectiveness.
Bezos’s stunt highlighted the value of executive involvement in validating front-line realities, and the risks of relying solely on internal dashboards without real-world verification.
While the experience may have been uncomfortable for those in the room, and for the service agent who unknowingly took the founder’s call, it ultimately served as a catalyst for reviewing and improving the company’s customer service metrics and, ultimately it’s customer service.
Although the call was somewhat performative, creating a workplace culture where frontline feedback is taken seriously can reveal weaknesses in reporting systems, improve service quality, and drive more authentic employee engagement across teams.
