In the late 1990’s, Amazon was growing fast.
Every week, Jeff Bezos gathered his leadership team for their most important ritual: the Weekly Business Review.
One day, the head of customer service proudly presented a slide: “Average phone wait times: 59 seconds.”
Tick - move on to the next item.
Jeff paused.
A number of Amazon’s customers were not happy. He knew this because he maintained and read a public email account. Customers would email him directly, Jeff would forward on to the appropriate executive with a simple “?” for follow up.
But his customer service leader was saying everything was rosy. Something didn’t add up…
So right there, in the middle of the meeting, Jeff did something radical: Placing the call on speaker, with the entire executive team watching, he picked up the phone and called Amazon’s customer support line…
The room went silent.
60 seconds passed.
Then 2 minutes. Then 5 minutes.
Still no answer.
After 10 minutes of hold music - still nothing.
“It was a really long time,” Jeff recalled. “More than 10 minutes.” In a flash, the metric they’d been using to reassure investors and guide operations collapsed. The problem? The data wasn’t wrong – but it was measuring the wrong thing.
The metric measured average wait time for answered calls, ignoring the calls that never got picked up. That one moment rewired Amazon’s entire approach to measurement, feedback, and truth.
Jeff didn’t just want favorable data, he wanted reality.
The result? Amazon rebuilt its customer service from the ground up - and made customer service a core part of its moat.
Reflecting on that meeting, Jeff said:
“When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.”
This post was originally shared by on Linkedin.