Amazon Turkey Retail Services - Customer Service Department of the Year

Company: Amazon Turkey Retail Services, Istanbul, Turkey
Company Description: Amazon.com.tr (Amazon Turkey) is the Turkish division of the American multinational technology company Amazon.com, Inc., providing services in e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Department Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year - Retail

Nomination Title: Amazon Turkey Retail Services

Striving to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, Amazon is the world's largest e-commerce website. It is also AI assistant provider, live-streaming platform and cloud computing platform owner. Amazon’s “Day 1” mentality is our approach of doing everything with the energy and entrepreneurial spirit of a new organization on its first day.

On September 19, 2018, Amazon.com.tr opened its virtual doors for the first time to serve customers in Turkey. The Customer Service (CS) department is a strategic pillar of growth for our Turkish business, working hard to raise the customer experience bar in the industry by delivering customer-centric services, products and solutions design.

The core Turkish CS department is comprised of many employees across CS Operations, Customer Effort Reduction, Operations Engineering and Consumer Customer Service Support teams; operating out of Germany and Turkey. Amazon CS is accessible 24/7 and serves customers through four different channels; Phone, Live Chat, Email and Social Media.

We advocate for our customers and quickly resolve defects that impact the customer experience. We work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment for our CS employees. We have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun.

Operational Excellence:

Our CS department Insists on the Highest Standards, and measures operational excellence in various KPIs. Since Q3 2019, our CS team achieved in average.

Customer Experience:

As a result of our CX improvement initiatives, we reduced the need for our customers to contact us.

Employee Experience:

We work every day to create a safer, higher performing, more productive, diverse, and just work environment for our CS employees.

1. Entire Turkey CS organization is working from home since Q1 2020,
2. We continued fun activities virtually (e.g. cooking/yoga workshops, book-club meetings and care packages.)

Community Support:

We begin each day with a determination to be better for our customers, and health and safety of our customers remained our highest priority. To minimize exposure during the COVID-19 pandemic, we;

1. introduced refunds without returns for items valued under a certain amount.
2. extended our return windows over 90 days
3. launched a returns pick-up service with help of new logistic partners for the safety of our customers.

We started our collaboration with BlindLook to integrate technology into our website and mobile apps, so visually-impaired Amazon customers can navigate through the products freely and access CS with ease.

Our department has created CX initiatives that sets the example for other Amazon marketplaces. Our unique Voice of the Customer mechanisms detect and highlight business insights supported through quantitative and qualitative data. Our Proactive Interception programs detect egregious customer experiences in real time and alert our CS escalation teams for timely interception.

With our continuous efforts since Q3 2019 we became best in class across Europe, in terms of year over year improvement on inbound contacts per unit rates. In terms of operational excellence, our team has exceeded service level targets in all contact channels, and placed top 3 among 19 departments globally in terms of the Contact Customer Experience score subcategory Understandability.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have offered a special one-time “Thank You” bonus to our employees totaling over $500 million globally, in addition to a base pay increase by approximately 2€ per hour. The “Connections” employee experience survey results for our department exceeded Amazon benchmarks with over 90% in Team Environment, Culture and Overall scores.

As our CS department pioneered initiatives to help improve our customer experience during the pandemic, our customer-centric policies disrupted the e-commerce landscape in Turkey, making us the online retailer with the longest return windows in Turkey, and the only one offering refunds without return through self-service platforms. We also became the first online retailer in Turkey to collaborate with BlindLook to enable better accessibility to their platforms for visually impaired people.