Amazon's Legacy May Be In What They Taught Us About Managing Customer Expectations
Posted by Ken Bentham on Sat, Apr 17, 2010 @ 12:40 PM
Amazon.com has confirmed that it is exiting the Incentive industry after becoming the cornerstone supplier to thousands of customers in less than three years. This was no small feat. The Incentive industry had had a long history of making it extremely difficult to secure accurate reward data, offer broad reward selection, and deliver timely fulfillment and order tracking. Until Amazon.com this was simply a dream shared by many but executed by no one.
Whatever the reason, it can't be denied that Amazon.com's short foray into the Incentive world taught us all a thing or two about how to properly manage reward selection and fulfillment while enabling our industry to finally exceed our customers' expectations. They were heads and tails above the rest!
I'm speaking of course about things such as delivering the best selection while driving down reward cost; well below what our traditional Incentive suppliers could deliver the same item for. Amazon.com was the first to ensure two-three day delivery with full EDI order tracking making it possible to manage a national drop ship program with complete data integrity. This is now the standard for our industry--an industry that pre-Amazon.com, accepted something far less than perfection as the norm. No matter what we do going forward, we cannot go back to those days.
Amazon.com was only in the fulfillment game for a short time, but as an industry we all have to admit, it was long enough to make a big impact.