Amazon Mayday Button Brings Help in 9.75 Seconds

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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If free delivery and an online e-commerce site that offers millions and millions of products and service are not enough, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has released numbers showing that Kindle Fire HDX customers who used the Mayday button to get customer service enjoy a response time of an average of 9.75 seconds.

The Fire HDX is Amazon’s high-end tablet. It sells for as little as $299 for a version with 16GB of storage and operating on Wi-Fi. The price can rise as high as $409 for a version that has 64GB of storage and works on both Wi-Fi and a 4G system provided by Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ).

Amazon management released a statement about the Mayday button’s success:

Eight months ago, Amazon launched the Mayday button, connecting you to live, on-device tech support 24×7, 365 days a year — for free. Today, Amazon announced that the Mayday button is now the most popular way for Fire HDX customers to contact customer service, and the average response time is just 9.75 seconds.

“When we set out to invent the Mayday button, we wanted to revolutionize tech support—and we’re happy to report it’s working!” said Scott Brown, Director, Amazon Customer Service. “75% of customer contacts for Fire HDX now come via the Mayday button. Even as the Mayday button has grown to become the most popular way for customers to ask questions, the team’s been able to beat the response time goal of 15 seconds or less–our average is just 9.75 seconds.”

Amazon has released several products into crowded markets for which customer service may be the differentiating factor as it battles competition from large rivals. Among these are the premium video and song services bundled with Amazon Prime. And Amazon is expected to release a smartphone within days. The handset will compete with entrenched companies that hold a huge portion of the market already — Samsung and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL). Prime and Amazon’s smartphone are commodities. Customer service may be the sole edge Amazon has. And it has proven it can provide service in a fraction of a minute if the Mayday service is expanded across more of its products.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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