How to Answer: Brand Specialists embrace Amazon's Leadership Principle of 'Customer Obsession.' Talk about your most challenging customer and how you successfully delivered on their expectations.
Advice and answer examples written specifically for an Amazon job interview.
16. Brand Specialists embrace Amazon's Leadership Principle of 'Customer Obsession.' Talk about your most challenging customer and how you successfully delivered on their expectations.
How to Answer
Amazon's 1st Leadership Principle is 'Customer Obsession.' This principle states, 'Leaders start with the customer and work backward. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.'
Amazon is a company that proudly obsesses over its customers. As a Brand Specialist, you will be expected to delight your customers at every turn. The interviewer wants to know how you react when you face challenging situations. They also want to see evidence that you can maintain professional composure and continue delivering high-quality work even when you may feel like giving up. Show the interviewer that you are prepared to work vigorously for your customers, gain and maintain their trust.
This behavioral-based question requires an answer that includes storytelling. Choose a real-life example of when you went over and above to deliver a successful outcome for a customer. Amazon asks that when you answer behavioral interview questions, you try to follow the STAR answer method. STAR is an acronym for Situation, Task, Action, Result.
- Situation: Provide the contextual information the interviewer needs to know to make sense of your story.
- Task: Continuing to set the stage, give the interviewer an idea of your role and responsibilities in this story.
- Action: Next, offer a detailed description of the steps you took in this story.
- Result: Last, talk about the specific, measurable outcomes that resulted from your actions.
If you have related work experience, it's best to provide an example from your professional life. If you are new to your career and have never been in a customer-facing role, consider an example from your post-secondary education, a team sport, volunteer commitment, or a club-based activity.
Answer Example
"(Situation) I currently work for Company XYZ as a Marketing Coordinator. Recently, I was handed the file of a client known to have unrealistic expectations. My colleagues did not enjoy working with this client. (Task) Since I was the only coordinator yet to work with her, my manager wanted to see if I could develop a positive working relationship with this client. (Action) I set up a face-to-face meeting with my new client right away. Rather than start the meeting with a discussion of action steps and ideas, I addressed expectations. The client laid out everything that she expected in fine detail. Rather than interrupt her or tell her that these expectations couldn't be met, I asked where her benchmarks came from. The client expressed that she had researched a competitor's strategy for a similar project felt that our team could generate similar results. I thanked the client for her transparency and asked her to give the team and me a few days to research and come back with a project scope. We spent the next couple of days analyzing a few marketing case studies released by my client's competitor. We quickly realized that this competitor's marketing and advertising budget was far larger than the resources available to my client. In our next meeting, I explained the quantitative and qualitative data we collected. I expressed that we could use some of her competitor's approaches; however, the results would not be the same because financial resources were more limited in her case. Then, I presented a more appropriate strategy and project timeline with clear milestones. (Result) The client thanked me for offering a well-researched and realistic project outline versus simply telling her that her vision couldn't be met. In the past, she felt that she was being spoken down to, and she appreciated that I paid attention to her needs, took the time to understand her market, and research what her competitors were doing. In this instance, I showed customer obsession by working vigorously to gain and keep the clients' trust. I look forward to joining Amazon as a Brand Specialist where I will have the opportunity to support key vendors, help them dream up new strategies, and achieve their goals."
Anonymous Interview Answers with Professional Feedback
Anonymous Answer
I started with a virtual store on _______ and launched a series of products, designed, branded, and priced entirely by me. I approached several successful influencers and developed social media pages to support the marketing of the product.
To build a customer base and get the word of mouth we tried
i ) putting small gifts into cargo packages
ii) re-designed certain products as per customer feedback
iii) launched new years series
iv) introduced window stickers (which eventually became the main product)
Everybody was stuck at home at that time because of Covid and they really liked the idea of decorating children's windows for New Year.
And the product became very popular and we received 3,5K orders for Q4 2020 right after the launch. And 6K orders the next year. I read every comment very carefully and took action to provide the perfect customer journey.
T - 25% were about receiving a different item or a defective one mainly due to packaging and the delay.
75% of the negative comments were related to packaging. The envelope that we sent the stickers was folded during the shipping and got damaged when the weather is rainy etc.
A - I prioritized the customers and immediately sent them the correct item with a gift sticker inside. Sometimes the comments were anonymous only with the first capital letters, I tried to match the product name, delivery time, and comment time. I sent the customers without being asked, they were really surprised and happy when they got the package and adjusted their comments with higher points.
To fix the problem in the long term, I tried to find out the reason that makes confusion about sending products. I realized the issue arose from new year products. The product names were shown starting with the new year as keywords. I changed the names specifically related to the images and used new year keyword at the end of the product name which made it easier to read when you prepare the order.
I also bought a basic shipping label printer which made packaging super faster than gluing the order printout.
I found a packaging manufacturer and ordered high-quality cardboard poster tubes. But it was not possible to get them before January after that I found a temporary solution. I bought telescoping cardboard boxes as a temporary solution. After January we used poster tubes.
R- Focus on improving the end-to-end customer experience and making it faster, easier resulted in
%75 percent increased orders Q4 2021 with great comments on packaging in addition to the quality of the product. The average revenue per package increased by %25."
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