Jeff Bezos recounts the time he called Amazon’s customer service number mid-meeting

I have a saying, which is, when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right, and it's usually not the data is being miscollected. It's usually that you're not measuring the right thing. And so, you know, if you have a bunch of customers complaining about something, and at the same time, you know, your metrics look like why they shouldn't be complaining, you should doubt the metrics. And an early example of this was we had metrics that showed that our customers were waiting, I think less than, I don't know, 60 seconds when they called it 1-800-number to get, you know, phone customer service. But we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that. And anecdotally, it seemed longer than that. Like, you know, I would call customer service myself. And so one day we're in a meeting, and we get to this metric in the deck, and the guy who leads customer service is to fit in the metric. And I said, okay, let's call. Picked up the phone, and I dialed the 1-800-number and called customer service. And we just waited in silence for. What did it turn out to be? Oh, it was really long. More than 10 minutes, I think. Oh, wow. I mean, it was many minutes. And so, you know, it dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection. We weren't measuring the right thing. And that set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right. That's an uncomfortable thing to do. But you have to seek truth, even when it's uncomfortable. And you have to get people's attention, and they have to buy into it, and they have to get energized around really fixing things.