His customer-service department tracked two important metrics: average talk time (the amount of time an employee spent on the phone with a customer) and contacts per order (the number of times a purchase necessitated a customer phone call or e-mail). Bezos demanded that Price reduce both, but that was fundamentally impractical. If a customer-service rep stayed on the phone long enough to fully solve each customer’s problem, the number of contacts per order might go down, but the average talk time would go up. If the customer-service rep tried to jump off each call quickly, average talk times
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