Amazon's Feedback and Business Development System

Amazon's Feedback and Development System

Amazon stands out as an interesting case study for business practice. The company’s success, current feedback, and development system and its employee reward system provide invaluable knowledge for aspiring businesses. This paper analyses Amazon’s feedback and development system, its challenges and the employee reward system.

Amazon’s Current Feedback and Development System

Amazon’s current feedback and business development system is effective. A testament to this is the unprecedented success evidenced by groundbreaking profits that the company is enjoying currently. Rivet (2017) argues that the company prides itself on prompt customer response and through various platforms, responds to customer feedback and in almost all instances, creates improvement plans. The company has multiple customer feedback options, which include social media networks such as Twitter, the official Amazon website, and various customer forums that Amazon maintains. Amazon’s continued innovation is attributed to its rather seamless response to customer feedback. For instance, the introduction of Amazon lockers came about majorly because of customer feedback expressing reservations over the dropping of goods at their porches when they were away from home (Rivet, 2017). According to Rivet, Amazon’s development system is the reason for its success (2017). The development system at is multilayered with an array of individuals with different unique skillsets involved in planning for business success. At the very top, CEO Jeff Bezos leads the system. The company’s business development system has proven to be effective as it has been able to infuse new ideas and new business lines that further expand Amazon’s reach. In recent years, through its effective development system, Amazon’s cloud computing solutions, the Amazon web services, became profitable (Zhu & Liu, 2015). The system has also put in place Amazon business designed to sell directly to businesses, The company’s business has great potential, and in few quarters, it will prove the effectiveness of Amazon’s development system.

Improving the Feedback and Development System

Inasmuch as Amazon’s feedback and development system has largely been effective, it has some problems that require improvement. Foremost is the need to listen to customer complaints early enough to limit further customer dissatisfaction and prevent reputation damage. This issue is particularly important considering that Amazon deals with third-party sellers whose reliability cannot ultimately be guaranteed in spite of the efforts put to assure reliability. According to Zhu & Liu (2015), numerous customers have had problems with Amazon's third-party sellers and have requested Amazon to be a bit stricter and to exert more control to weed out scammers. The company’s development system has failed to get a long-lasting solution to this problem. More specifically, the slowness of solving this problem puts Amazon’s feedback system in question and in need of improvement. In spite of negative reviews, the business’s development system has also failed to revolutionize some aspects of Amazon such as the video streaming services, which lag behind some major players in the Industry such as Netflix. There is also an argument by Zhu & Liu (2015) that the multiplicity of Amazon services takes away its gist and does not quite impress some customers who prefer specialization.

Rewards System

The reward system at Amazon is not uniform for all employees. Even though all workers equally enjoy some benefits such as end-year bonuses, top-level employees comparatively earn more rewards in other non-inclusive benefits compared to lower level employees. Mehmood (2013) argues that reward systems are important for improving performance and employee loyalty. Reports that Amazon has refuted indicate that the company’s workplace is hostile and not very user-friendly due to cutthroat competition, which is actually encouraged (Spicer, 2015). In some instances, it is even reported that employees deliberately set up fellow employees so as to be favored for better rewards. A uniform rewards system, therefore, will remove undue competition and increase employee satisfaction and company performance in the long run.

Conclusion

In conclusion, therefore, Amazon’s success is a testament to the effectiveness of its feedback and development system. In spite of the success, the system has certain problems and improvements are desired. Finally, a uniform reward system for all employees will increase productivity and employee satisfaction.

References

Mehmood, S. (2013). Managing Performance through Reward System. IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science, 15(2), 64-67. doi: 10.9790/0837-1526467

Rivet, D. (2017). Amazon's Superior Innovation: A Study of Amazon's corporate structure, CEO, and reasons behind why it has become the most innovative company in today's market.

Spicer, A. (2015). The tragedy behind Amazon’s toxic management fad | Andre Spicer. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/17/amazon-management-fad-rank-yank-jeff-bezos

Zhu, F., & Liu, Q. (2015). Competing with Complementors: An Empirical Look at Amazon.com. Academy Of Management Proceedings, 2015(1), 15468. doi: 10.5465/ambpp.2015.15468abstract