So Amazon has a 1-800 number, where you can speak to a real live human-type person. It is, however, hard to find. Or rather, it was, until last week.
Kevin Kelly, who publishes the wonderful
Cool Tools, listed Amazon's 800 number, saying
[...] No other merchant online or offline has provided the ease and accuracy of ordering as Amazon does. Still, in my experience there are occasionally glitches that their email-bots can't deal with, usually entailing a minor billing snafu. In these rare cases you need Amazon.com's almost-secret real-person customer service telephone number. You won't find it on their website. I once got it by calling 800 directory assistance. In any case, they make it hard to find because a call costs Amazon more, so you should jot down this number for those special moments when only a human will do: 800-201-7575.
From Cool Tools, it was later posted to BoingBoing (and now, of course, here).
Kevin understands why the number is hard to find, and is trying to pass it along with the caveat that the reader should excercise some self-restraint when using it, and Xeni, who posted it to BoingBoing, passed along Kevin's . But if that worked, there would be no need to make it hard to find in the first place.
What I find interesting about this is the parallels with spam. Amazon can't afford not to have an 800 number, but they also know that if it gets in wide circulation, their customers will have much lower thresholds for calling it than Amazon wants them to have, so they try to make sure that the potential caller is willing to expend some energy to get the number. But the old social gradients that would mean slow diffusion of the number are gone, so now it's everywhere.
It will be interesting to see what Amazon does in response. Use of the number will presumably go up -- they could let the service get worse, and put the requirement that the customer expend energy to get to a live person into the phone wait time (the usual strategy), they could staff up the 800 number, and raise the funds by rasiing prices on the site, or they could even change 800 numbers periodically, the way people trying to shake off spam do.
Even sharing little tips with your friends gets conducted in a global register when the conversation takes place on the Web.
1. Jeff Jarvis on January 12, 2004 10:08 PM writes...
Actually, I found the number about a year ago through the greatest of equalizers: Google. I had a problem no automated email would solve. In frustration, I searched for "amazon 800" and, voila, one empowered consumer shared with the world. Called. Problem solved.
Permalink to CommentGoogle is the brain of the marketplace.
2. dreww on January 13, 2004 5:47 AM writes...
indeed, if you google for 'amazon 800' and hit "i'm feeling lucky", you get the result from a post on a addiction recovery forum.
which illustrates the last paragraph a lot better than a post by kevin kelly that gets repeated on boingboing. but then again, in 2004, if it hasn't happened in the blogosphere, it hasn't happened.
Permalink to Comment3. David on January 13, 2004 6:32 AM writes...
Unfortunately I have no (free) access to this number from Germany and Amazon in Germany does not have a freecall-number, just an expensive 01805 (costs about 10cents a minute which is as much as 6 times! as much as a long distance call costs here and they don't provide a "normal" phone-number so you have to pay those high rates - they are even getting money this way if you call them for support - a totally lack of support in Germany, but that's unfortunately also usual here - Germany is a "service desert" mostly) - but I'm continously looking - maybe some day they are registering a free call number in Germany as well (even if I don't think so). Greetings David.
PS: Please don't be angry about my english, it's not my native language, thanks.
Permalink to Comment4. Shayne on January 13, 2004 2:23 PM writes...
Several years ago (4-5 maybe?), Amazon used to include it's 1-800 number on every "Your Order has been Shipped" email. It was really nice. I never called it, but I knew it was there. Last year, they messed up massively on an order and I went online and tried to find the number. After 30 minutes of searching, I gave up online... and found it somewhere in my old pile of 10,000 emails. To me, the threshold Amazon has set for acquiring this information is unreasonably high.
Permalink to Comment5. dreww on January 14, 2004 10:51 PM writes...
yeah, the first google hit is up there with building a moon base.
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