Kim spent 12 years at Amazon where she managed various retail functions across Books, Grocery, Outdoors, and Tools categories, ultimately serving as director and category leader over a multi-billion-dollar business. Over the years, Kim relied on a customer-first approach to quickly navigate new role transitions and grow successful category businesses. Kim now exercises her customer obsession as Chief Customer Officer at Microsoft where she has leveraged many of the practices picked up at Amazon to help her teams delight enterprise customers.

Listen in to hear Kim share her experience with this core Amazon leadership principle and speak to the ways Amazon leaders use customer obsession to shape weekly business deep dives, team strategy sessions, partnerships with sellers and vendors, and mechanisms to empower frontline workers. You’ll likely come away with some new ideas to try and a renewed sense for how leaders can create value for customers through their work.

Mentioned in the podcast: 

Microsoft Dynamics: http://www.dynamics.com

Kim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-mathisen/

More from the episode:

3:38 – How to use a customer focus to quickly learn a new business

9:12 – Amazon’s internal practices to keep focus on the customer

16:08 – How Amazon leaders view sellers as customers

22:00 – What the difference looks like between just wanting to help customers and really obsessing over customers

27:20 – What sugar-free gummy bears can illustrate about Amazon’s customer obsession and order volume

28:40 – How Kim has applied Customer Obsession in her subsequent work at Microsoft

32:40 – Tips for building a stronger customer-centered culture in any business