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Bezos dialed customer service himself
Data against anecdotes
This was very early in Amazon's history, and the team was going over a set of documents. Bezos had heard that many customers were complaining about call wait times, yet the data gave him no way to explain why. His rule for moments like that: when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.
The phone call
The head of customer service reported the wait-time metric as under sixty seconds, which was in line with expectations. Bezos paused the meeting anyway and called the 1-800 number.
He waited on hold for over ten minutes. A wait that long pointed to a problem with how the wait-time data was being collected.
Why can an average hide a long wait?
An average blends every call into one number, so a handful of very long waits can vanish inside a crowd of quick ones. Engineers who run large systems often track percentiles instead, such as the wait that the slowest one percent of callers experience. Queueing theory also shows that waits do not grow in a straight line: as a phone line nears full capacity, the queue lengthens sharply.
How can a wait-time metric miss the real wait?
Phone systems can start the clock at different moments, such as when a call reaches an agent queue rather than when the caller first dials. Time spent in an automated menu may not be counted at all. Calls that end when the caller hangs up are sometimes left out of the average, which removes some of the longest waits from the data. Call-center reports therefore often pair average speed of answer with an abandonment rate.
Why do measured numbers drift from reality?
British economist Charles Goodhart observed in a 1975 paper on monetary policy that a statistical relationship tends to break down once it is used for control. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern later phrased the idea in the form most people know: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. People then work on the number rather than on the thing it was meant to track. The idea is now called Goodhart's law.
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