Regular readers of my blogs and articles know that I’m a huge fan of Amazon. I’ve been buying from Amazon for well over a decade now and they continue to impress me with the things they do. Here’s my recent experience:
I was searching for a specialized business book (a book on data analytics) and had read some reviews about some different titles. I came across a title that looked very interesting to me so I looked up the book. I didn’t really recognize the book but it definitely sounded interesting. Then I noted near the top of the screen the following words:
Ah ha! Turns out I purchased this book TWO YEARS ago, but had forgotten about it. I’m firmly convinced that had Amazon not told me this, there’s a good chance I would have ordered the book again.
This is remarkable for two reasons: 1) Amazon is instantly giving me information that is helpful to me and 2) this information is, technically, NOT helpful to Amazon (because they could have made another sale to me). That’s customer service of the highest order and yet another reason for me to sing Amazon’s praises.
What are you doing at your association to amaze your members and customers? Even little touches like these can make a big difference.
I agree with you Wes. Today I received an e-mail from Amazon letting me know of a new benefit for Amazon Prime members. It “just happened” to show up in my inbox on the same day that my Prime membership renewed. There was no mention of the renewal in the e-mail (I only know about it because I get notifications from my bank), just the focus on the new value they’ve created for me. That’s cool. Why can’t associations do it that well?
I agree with you Wes. Today I received an e-mail from Amazon letting me know of a new benefit for Amazon Prime members. It “just happened” to show up in my inbox on the same day that my Prime membership renewed. There was no mention of the renewal in the e-mail (I only know about it because I get notifications from my bank), just the focus on the new value they’ve created for me. That’s cool. Why can’t associations do it that well?
Totally agree, Jeff. These are small actions with big impact!
Gotta tell you,
I’m a huge fan as well, but from another side. Amazon Web Services Elastic Computing Cloud is completely revolutionizing business computing. Essentially; they are making servers obsolete.
More accurately, EC2 makes going out and purchasing a server like going out an purchasing a power generator; almost no one would do that when you can plug into a wall.
The implications of this paradigm shift are staggering; we are rapidly moving away from the idea of buying/leasing a “server,” installing an Operating System, a Database, a Web Server, a Cache Daemon, etc, to simply “spinning up” templated server instances in the cloud and hobbling together highly available services to build an application. Among many things, this means scalability worries are irrelevant; instances can be scaled up or down as needed. It also dramatically lowers the cost of entry to doing something like, say, starting a SaaS business!
Cloud computing is coming!
Interesting perspective, Andrew. Thanks for sharing.