Amazon.com is an online store that sells many different items (books, music, movies, electronics, and even groceries).  I’ve been a customer of theirs since 1998.  I like them quite a bit in general.  Recently, I had a question for them, and a sort of criticism.

Okay, first I’d like to point out that I do realize Amazon is a massive organization.  And that they handled my return issue perfectly even if I had never thought twice about whether or not my defective item was successfully shipped back.  And that there was a way to speak with them on the phone.  And that they spoke with me for just under 23 minutes (including one interdepartmental transfer, which the original rep stayed on the line until complete).  And that they actually sent me a survey that asked for the feedback I offered in this post.  I mean, holy crap, Amazon.com really does offer legendary customer service.

This is the third time I have called them in the past 10 years of doing business.  The first was to return my Kindle (as I decided I would rather pay them the restocking fee after 35 days of Kindle enjoyment and use the proceeds to buy an iPhone instead).  The second was when I purchased a few individual TV show episode downloads that overlapped with the entire season that I later bought (they refunded the money I had overpayed, and they did it quite graciously).  This last was due to a bad computer mouse.  (Bad mouse!  No cheese for you.)

Please let me also point out that before I even called them, Amazon.com paid for the return postage for the defective item by providing an email with a link in it that generated a USPS shipping label.  And also that the brand new replacement mouse arrived within 72 hours of my non-business-hour request.  So I already had a replacement by the time any of this took place.

I am genuinely humbled and impressed by their service.

Yet, for some reason it caught my attention that I had no idea whether or not my fancy and somewhat expensive wireless laser mouse that I sent them would actually reach them (and thus allow them to return it to the manufacturer).  Because from my point of view, there was no way to know.  Even after a week had gone by.

Thus the below letter to amazon after a somewhat fruitless phone call in response to their request for feedback:

Email Requesting Feedback (Amazon Customer Service Email from Wendi): “Was your question answered by calling? yes/[no]“:

Hi Wendi,

My original order was for a wireless mouse that quit working after a short time.  Amazon quickly shipped me a replacement, and provided a shipping label to send back the old one via USPS.  Thank you.  I shipped back the old one using this label on 9/13/2008.

My question (reason for calling) was to determine how to track the progress of this package back to Amazon’s return center.  My rep ultimately concluded that there was no way to track this, and that I should simply wait the full two weeks to hear back from Amazon when it did arrive.  I was not completely satisfied with this answer.

A few minutes after our call ended, I was actually able to discover a means for tracking the shipment.  I did this by locating my original copy of the pre-paid shipping label that Amazon provided within my email archive.

While inspecting this label, I found the name of a company that Amazon contracts with for part of the package return process named “Newgistics” in small print.  A quick Google search of this name landed me on www.newgistics.com

It turned out that the Newgistics.com website offered the return package tracking I needed.  To use this, I simply pasted one of the codes from the return shipping label into the ‘track a package’ field on the page of this Amazon vendor: “420 56901 9158 1372 0226 8052 8314 94″.  The result?  The Newgistics site confirmed that the package is in currently transit to Lexington, KY.

In the end, I was able to find out for myself that the package was successfully scanned into the USPS system (and apparently the newgistics system too) and still is on the way to Amazon’s return center in Lexington, KY.  Also, I learned that it has not arrived yet, which must be why Amazon customer service was generally scratching their head.

This information that I ultimately discovered for myself with a bit of persistence was all I had originally wanted.

Thank you to Amazon for making this information available, even if it was very difficult to find and beyond the training/info available to the phone based customer rep.

Overall, Amazon continues to live up to its legendary customer service reputation in my book, which I continue to reward with my 10th year of patronage (and the increasing categories of purchases that I award).

All my best,

Mike Randrup

Citing the increased relevance of Web Applications (an important paradigm shift from the desktop that I have argued zealously for across 9 years now and am glad to see being so important in 2008) Google is today launching a new web browser . This browser promises to be a way to "start over" in terms of creating a web browser client that can serve very effectively as a web application client. It’s based on the same open-source framework as Apple’s Safari (a little tid-bit I learned back when we began developing for iPhone). Google plans to release it fully tomorrow. If Google can convince us all to download this thing (by.. I dunno… putting a link on its ‘rarely’ visited home page or some-such tactic), this might rapidly become a widely used and useful tool. Hooray for those of us that make interesting Web Applications for a living… www.MetroPlexWebTech.com

One question: Given Google’s history of releasing things in Beta for long periods (e.g. Gmail measured beta in years), have they implemented a new strategy for releasing a web browser? And also, how does this affect/relate to Google’s relationship to Mozilla and FireFox ?

Well, almost.

Naturally I’m referring to Microsoft’s newly-made-live-and-public PhotoSynth technology with the freshly added ability to create your own PhotoSynth content.

Now PhotoSynths are NOT the same thing as your old school, late 90s virtual tour animated photo panoramas.

In the below YouTube video, you can see a screencast I filmed of a tour through a PhotoSynth I created of my home in Dallas:

By going around my house and taking 322 individual photographs, and uploading them into the new Microsoft PhotoSynth creator, I had hoped to create a complete 3D tour of my home that I could show people (family members) in distant areas in order to share my home with them. Although far better than hearing a description of the phone over the phone, or seeing just a few still photos, it wasn’t completely immersive.

Even though I followed the Microsoft PhotoSynth guidelines fairly well (or so I thought), the panorama that my photos allowed the system to create were about 18% ‘connectable’ according to the system. Did I take the photos poorly? Would it work better with a wide-angle, higher resolution camera? Does the software need 100,000 people like me to upload data so that they can improve the algorithm for detecting how pictures fit together?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Please view the video to see how it turned out, and visit Microsoft PhotoSynth to try it out for yourself. They have created tours of places far more interesting than my house in north Dallas, Texas.

On the plus side, for the first time my grandma in California really seemed to understand how the parts of my house connected together and the layout of the space. Previously she had see a few still photos, and hadn’t really visualized what it was like to be here. So even my simple effort actually achieved what I had hoped it would. It is very sophisticated computer graphics technology, and has been adapted to be very user friendly. No doubt, they have already taken this far beyond what has been released to the likes of us.

You can see what I made here on the PhotoSynth website. (Please note: to view the synth directly, you’ll be prompted to install the MS PhotoSynth viewer software. Just view the demonstration I uploaded to YouTube instead if you don’t want to install any software.)

Seth Godin (the marketing book author and fervent blogger) has always had plenty of interesting stuff to say. His recent post on how to effectively help create a mini-meritocracy to sort through finalist candidates for a hiring process using web tools like FaceBook groups and BaseCamp projects was fascinating. Having a batch of potential recruits ‘fight’ it out by cooperating best via online collaboration tools would naturally see a quick stratification of ability. As we develop better hiring processes within our own company, I can see trying this method out in various forms very soon.

"It was absolutely fascinating. Within a day, the group had divided into four camps:

• The game-show contestants, quick on the trigger, who were searching for a quick yes or no. Most of them left.
• The lurkers. They were there, but we couldn’t tell.
• The followers. They waited for someone to tell them what to do.
• The leaders. A few started conversations, directed initiatives and got to work.

Want to guess who I hired? (It was a paid gig and five ended up spending time with me in NY on a somewhat rolling basis). If you’re hiring for people to work online, I can’t imagine not screening people in this way. This is the work, and you can watch people do it for real before you hire them." from Seth Godin’s Blog