Topics: Amazon, Jeff Bezos, Shopping, UK News
Sometimes it’s better to go to the top with your complaints, as one Amazon shopper discovered when they messaged Jeff Bezos after exhausting other options related to their delivery mishap.
According to Capital One Shopping, Amazon Logistics processed a whopping 6.3 billion US delivery orders last year alone.
But with so many packages flying out of warehouses up and down the country, sometimes customers have issues that cannot be resolved by service agents.
This is exactly what happened to one person in Britain, according to their post on the popular Reddit thread, LegalAdviceUK.
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They said that they’d ordered a so-called ‘high-value item’ from Amazon, which had set them back a whopping £1,099.97 ($1,478).
Nobody wants a present of that price to go missing, especially the company itself, so they have something in place called one-time passwords (OTP).
Your unique OTP is a six-digit code that is supposed to be delivered to your registered phone number or email address and given to delivery drivers to ensure high-value orders end up in the right hands.
However, this Redditor claimed that when they gave their password to the delivery driver, they didn’t receive their $1000+ item. Instead, several lower-value items had arrived.
To make matters worse, they discovered their expensive parcel had actually been marked as delivered with a one-time password by Amazon.
According to the poster, speaking to advisors hadn’t really gotten them anywhere. So, they took matters into their own hands and contacted the public email address of CEO Jeff Bezos.
And to their surprise, they actually got a reply. Well, sort of.
The message wasn’t actually from the 61-year-old billionaire; it was from a woman called Keisha who worked with 'executive customer relations'.
She claimed she was replying on behalf of Bezos, and that he had 'received [their] correspondence'.
Keisha wrote: "Please be assured that from an Amazon perspective, it is completely unacceptable for a driver to act in this manner."
The customer claimed that after the initial email correspondence, they received a phone call from Keisha to clarify the matter.
They went on to say that they’d not only received a full refund on their high-profile gift, but that they’d been given a £100 ($134) Amazon gift card as a gesture of goodwill.
They added that Keisha said she would speak to the call centre staff about training to ensure it didn't happen again.
Funnily enough, this isn’t actually the first time that someone has reached out directly to Bezos’ inbox and received a response.
Tara Jones, who worked in an Amazon warehouse in Oklahoma, contacted Bezos in desperation back in 2020 after she had been underpaid by $90 after going on medical leave.
She wrote: “I’m behind on bills, all because the pay team messed up. I’m crying as I write this email.”
Unbeknownst to her, Tara's email actually sparked a major internal investigation, which, according to the New York Times, saw 179 Amazon warehouses affected by the pay issue.
Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told The Independent: “We’re disappointed when any of our employees experience an issue with their leave.
"The New York Times article suggested these issues are widespread and ongoing. They are not.
"We went back and audited the period in question to make sure employees received their pay, and to our knowledge, there are no outstanding issues.“The controls we’ve implemented over the last 18 months have resulted in less than 1 per cent of people experiencing an issue while being on paid leave."
So, as we say, sometimes it pays off to go directly to the boss - especially when your boss is one of the richest men alive.
