The other day I needed to call Amazon with a question about my associates account and stumbled onto something quite unique: Amazon’s system for speaking to customers via the telephone.

If you need to call Amazon go to any of their Help pages and on the right hand side there is a “Contact us” box. You then have the choice of contacting them by e-mail or phone.

If you choose “By phone,” it takes you to a page where you click a “Call me” button. Once that’s done, a box pops up asking for your phone number and when you wish to be called (right now or in 5, 10 or 15 minutes).

I clicked “Right now,” and suddenly a message popped up that said “Connecting,” and within less than a second, the message in the box said “Ringing,” and what do you know; my phone started ringing!

I picked it up, listened to a short recorded message and then within a minute (56 seconds to be exact) an Amazon.com customer service rep was on the line! Fantastic; why can’t everybody do that? And don’t make excuses and tell me something stupid like, “Oh, you don’t understand Amazon is different. You can’t do that in our industry.”

Yeah, you’re right Amazon is different: they care about making it easy for the customer. On top of that I’ll bet their call volume rivals most any other company out there, no matter what the industry. So don’t tell me it can’t be done. In fact, I even know a bank that does it! Yes, that’s right, a bank.

I do my banking with BB&T. I’ve had my business account with them since 1997. As many banks do, they have a free online banking feature that I use to pay all my bills. What’s most amazing about it is, their toll free customer service number.

When you call, the voice response system will ask you a couple of questions:

• Is this a business account or personal account?
  
• Are you having a problem with online banking, Quicken or a payment you made?

The second you push a number to designate your problem a customer service rep picks up every single time! I don’t know how they do it and when I asked, all they could say was, “Well sir, we have a lot of people here answering the phones.” So do many other companies! But that doesn’t seem to stop them from putting us on hold for what seems like an eternity.

So, let’s see, an online retailer can do it, a bank can do it, and I know an airline can do it (Southwest). Three major companies in three totally different industries can all have you speaking to a person immediately. What possible excuse can those companies who don’t do this have? The only thing I can think of is that they just don’t care.