Jeff Bezos explains the legendary call he made to Amazon customer service

The founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos, has sat down for the longest interview he has ever done, where he touched on many different aspects of his long career, including the iconic phone call he made during the early days of Amazon.

Bezos, who has since left his role as CEO of Amazon and moved on to his new concentration of space exploration through Blue Origin, responded to a question from Lex Fridman on the Lex Fridman Podcast where he was asked about the call he made to Amazon's customer service. Bezos first touched on one of his business philosophies: "When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right."

Bezos continued to explain that typically, when you are faced with this issue, the wrong data is being collected, and there isn't a problem with the way it's being collected. The former Amazon CEO recounted an early problem for the company; internal metrics indicated that Amazon customers were waiting less than a minute to reach a customer service representative. However, Amazon was receiving a lot of complaints about wait times far exceeding the expected 1-minute wait time.

The former Amazon CEO continued and explained he was in the company's Weekly Business Review (WBR), and the head of customer service at Amazon was showing Bezos the metric that indicated wait times were approximately 1 minute. To illustrate his point about how anecdotal evidence can be right, Bezos said he decided to call Amazon customer service right there in the business meeting.

Bezos said that he was on hold for more than 10 minutes, and the entire business meeting was silent throughout this period. Ultimately, Bezos said during the podcast that this strategy dramatically illustrated that there was something wrong with the data collection and that Amazon weren't "measuring the right thing." Eventually, Amazon was able to identify its key issues internally, fix its customer service problem, and move on to become one of the biggest brands in the world and an astronomically dominant force in online retail.

Notably, Bezos has moved his attention to Blue Origin, an aerospace manufacturer that is concentrating on developing a viable means of transportation to space. It was only a few days ago that Blue Origin launched its New Shepard rocket, which marked the company's first return to the last frontier after a year-long hiatus. If you are interested in learning more about Jeff Bezos, check out the full podcast with him above.