Tech

When Amazon Employees Receive These One-Character Emails From Jeff Bezos, They Go Into A Frenzy

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Jeff Bezos Amazon
Jeff Bezos  Getty Images/Scott Olson

Jeff Bezos may run Amazon and he may be a billionaire, but he is very accessible to his customers with an easy-to-find email address, jeff@amazon.com. And when his customers aren't pleased, Bezos isn't either.

Businessweek's Brad Stone has written a lengthy cover story on Amazon that opens with a bit about Bezos' email style and shows how important customer service is to him.

When a customer sends Bezos an email complaining about something Amazon-related, Bezos forwards the message to the appropriate person at the company. The only addition Bezos makes to the email is one character:

"?"

The recipient then scrambles to solve the issue and must get his or her reply approved by multiple people before responding to Bezos.

Stone writes:

"When Amazon employees get a Bezos question mark e-mail, they react as though they’ve discovered a ticking bomb. They’ve typically got a few hours to solve whatever issue the CEO has flagged and prepare a thorough explanation for how it occurred, a response that will be reviewed by a succession of managers before the answer is presented to Bezos himself. Such escalations, as these e-mails are known, are Bezos’s way of ensuring that the customer’s voice is constantly heard inside the company."

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Alyson is the Editor-in-Chief and CCO at Fortune.  She was previously a co Editor-in-Chief overseeing Business Insider's tech and business coverage.She joined Business Insider in July 2008 as the company's sixth employee. She started as a sales planner before joining the editorial team in 2010, where she became a startup reporter and was first to cover some of today's largest tech companies, including Pinterest, Tinder, Instagram, Uber and Snap. Alyson rose to become a senior correspondent, then Executive Editor.She was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider in 2016, at which point she became the youngest and only woman to run a global business publication. Under her leadership, the business division has grown to hundreds of  millions of monthly readers.Alyson was a host of  Insider's conferences and launched a podcast, "Success! How I Did It," where she interviewed influencers ranging from Sheryl Sandberg to Steve Ballmer about their career paths (subscribe on iTunes here).She has appeared on ABC, Good Morning America, Al Jazeera, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and CBC, and she has interviewed media personalities such as Megyn Kelly, technology leaders like Fred Wilson, political leaders like John Brennan, and sports star LeBron James. She is a judge for the prestigious Gerald Loeb Awards in business journalism, and has been named one of Min's Rising Stars in Media, as well as Folio's 2017 Top Women in Media.She graduated from Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications, where she majored in psychology and advertising.You can read some of her investigative articles here:Leaked videos reveal the true founding story of SnapchatThe founder who dumped Jared Kushner: Inside the phone call that left the White House star in a fit of rageThe downfall of billion-dollar startup, FabHow a startup that raised the largest seed round in Silicon Valley history blew itself up before it even launchedThe dark side of Facebook, where people lie, cheat, and make millionsA profile of Uber's controversial CEO, Travis KalanickThe mystery of Jody Sherman, a founder who was driven to suicide and left behind a shocking business disasterDisclosure: Alyson owns bitcoin and Snap. She is also an investor in The Spun, a sports-media startup founded by her husband.