The Most Respected Company Is The One Who Doesn’t Want To Talk To You

Harris Interactive recently asked 19,000 US residents their feelings about the country’s 60 “most visible” companies. When it came to ranking “corporate reputations” the top five winners were Johnson & Johnson, Google, Disney, Apple and then, at the very top of the list, Amazon. The Seattle online retailer also took top honors in “emotional appeal” beating out Disney by five points.

“Amazon is predominantly a virtual company where you don’t get to see the people. You don’t see brick and mortar. For them to first of all have the highest reputation, but more importantly to be the company with far and away the highest emotional appeal, is amazing.” -Robert Fronk, EVP at Harris

It’s no secret that we seem to admire tech companies more than any other industry right now. This isn’t to say that all tech companies scored well in the Harris poll but the majority of them did. It’s interesting to think about why this often is the case…

A little over a year ago, Jeff Bezos was asked about Amazon’s philosophy on customer service and his answer was contrary to many things we read today.

Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact. What went wrong? Why did that person have to call? Why aren’t they spending that time talking to their family instead of talking to us? How do we fix it?

So it’s not just about talking and engagement. It’s more about understanding each customer, knowing their needs and developing systems to deliver the service and experience they need. Tech companies with their access to data have the ability to do this extremely well but any industry can find a way. And as the Harris poll shows, when each customer feels that their needs are well understood the resulting consumer sentiments surrounding corporate reputation and emotional appeal will always rank high in the mind.