Jeff Bezos explains why he called Amazon customer service mid-meeting in seriously awkward moment

Imagine working on a customer service desk and receiving a call from the big boss himself through the helpline.

You’d instantly assume it was a prank, surely.

But Jeff Bezos caused what was probably a seriously awkward moment when he did just that.

I mean, it’s no surprise that with so much wealth to his name and his company that the Amazon founder keeps on top of things.

The 61-year-old is known for his no-nonsense approach from his intimidating ‘question mark method’ to the two-pizza rule.

And Bezos explained just why he called up Amazon’s customer services in the middle of a meeting – even if it was deemed to be rather ‘uncomfortable’.

Bezos doesn't mess about. ( Alex Wong/Getty Images)

During an interview on the Lex Fridman podcast, the tech boss explained that he believes ‘when the data and the anecdotes disagree’ then it’s the anecdotes that are ‘usually right.'

“It’s usually not that the data is being mis collected,” he said. “It’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing.”

So, Bezos says that if there’s a ‘bunch of customers complaining about something’, there’s a chance the metrics might actually disagree. In those circumstances, he reckons it’s best to ‘doubt the metrics.'

And that’s just what he did while in a meeting.

“We had metrics that showed that our customers were waiting, I think, less than 60 seconds when they called it 1800 number to get phone customer service,” he explained.

“But we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that.”

This was proving to be a clear example of the ‘data and the anecdotes’ disagreeing.

“And so, one day, we're in a meeting room, we get to this metric in the deck,” Bezos recalled.

It was due to being presented with this mismatch of metrics and complaints that the boss decided to call up the line himself.

Imagine being on the other end of that test call. (Monica Schipper/Getty Images)

“I picked up the phone and I dialled the 1800 number and called customer service, and we just waited in silence,” he explained.

Bezos said he actually ended up waiting ‘more than 10 minutes’, with a ‘really long’ wait.

“It dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection,” he explained. “We weren’t measuring the right thing.”

A ‘chain of events’ was then set off to ensure the problem with the data collection was solved.

“But that's an uncomfortable thing to do, but you have to seek truth, even when it's uncomfortable,” he added. “And you have to get people's attention, and they have to buy into it, and they have to get energised around really fixing things.”

Well, imagine being the customer service worker on the other end when you find out its big boss Bezos himself.