Amazon’s failure of ownership

When the left hand won’t read what the right hand wrote

In my last post, I described how Amazon locked me out of enabling two-step verification, bounced me endlessly between KDP and Retail, and in the process shredded its own claim to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company.”

That story should have been enough of a warning. But Amazon wasn’t done proving my point.

The phone number paradox

Amazon KDP recently wrote to me:

“We tried contacting you at the phone number listed in your account and couldn’t get through.”

The irony could not be sharper:

• That’s the same number I already told them is no longer active.
• The working Vietnam number is in my email signature. In every message. In the case history. Supplied over and over again.
• And yet—instead of reading, thinking, or acting—they proudly dialled the dead number. The very number their own system refuses to let me change.

It’s a Kafkaesque loop: blocked from updating my phone number, then penalised for not answering the broken one.

Scripts instead of sense

This isn’t about a single employee. It’s about a system that forces staff to cling to scripts rather than apply judgement.

KDP insists, “We’re not dismissing your concern; we’re guiding you to the appropriate team.” But when every “appropriate team” is another dead end, the effect is dismissal. The hand-off loop becomes the policy.

Retail says they can’t see KDP case history. KDP says Retail owns 2SV. The customer is told, yet again, to start over.

What gets lost?

• The history of the case.
• The actual evidence (screenshots, timestamps, case numbers).
• The human being trying to resolve the issue.

The leadership lesson

Here’s the deeper leadership failure on display:

• Reading matters. Customers should not have to repeat information already in the record. When staff don’t read the history, they erase trust.
• Ownership matters. The job of a customer-facing employee is not to bounce problems sideways; it’s to own the path to resolution, even if another team must implement it.
• Culture matters. A “customer-centric” culture is meaningless if frontline staff are stripped of agency and told only to recite boundaries.

Why leaders should care

Amazon will survive this. But for any other organisation, this is a blueprint for losing customers.

When your people can’t or won’t read the case history in front of them, you don’t just waste time. You send a louder message: “We don’t care enough to even listen.”

And once customers realise that’s your culture, no amount of branding, marketing, or slogans will save you.