KENNEWICK, Wash. – Ketul Poshia stiffens his posture in his chair. He flashes a smile that seems to come far too easily to him. And then Poshia, a customer service representative with Amazon's Mayday video tech support, clicks his PC mouse to let an Amazon customer's frustration in.
A woman's voice comes over Poshia's headset, a bit confused about why she isn't able to get e-mail on her Fire tablet.
"I might have pressed something, but I haven't gotten e-mails since yesterday," the woman tells Poshia.
While the customer can see Poshia, in a compact cubicle with an Amazon-branded backdrop behind him, Poshia can see only the screen of her Fire tablet. It's clearly not the first time Poshia, who's been working at the customer service center since 2013, has dealt with missing e-mails, and his diagnosis is quick.
The caller recently changed her password for her e-mail provider but hadn't updated it on her tablet. Poshia walks her through the process and, within a few minutes, her old e-mails flow onto her Fire.
Amazon.com founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has said that customer contact with Amazon, such as the one over missing e-mail, usually represents a "defect" in the online retail giant's operations. But those contacts are inevitable. That's why Amazon has a team of more than 500 here, in this city 180 miles southeast of Seattle, answering calls, replying to tweets and chatting via video to salve customers' anger and resolve their problems. And the company has added hundreds more temporary reps for the holiday season.
There's no shortage of problems. The center, one of six Amazon has in the United States, responds to thousands of customer calls a day, according to the Seattle-based company. Often, customers want tech support for Amazon's various devices. Sometimes, they need help clarifying bills. And plenty of times, customers want to know why their packages are late, and when they can expect delivery.
And yet, with so many "defects," Amazon consistently ranks among the top retailers when it comes to customer satisfaction, from organizations such as customer research firm Temkin Group, Zogby Analytics, and the Institute of Customer Service in the United Kingdom.