Tech Table Thursday, December 5, 2013
December 5, 2013
Justin: Welcome to MPA’s Tech Table. I’m Justin.
Diana: And I’m Diana.
Justin: And we’re your hosts. We’ll be serving up a heaping spoonful of all things tech.
Diana: We promise: it’ll be easy to digest. Well, hello, Justin.
Justin: Hello, Diana. It’s Thursday.
Diana: Yes. Theme Thursday.
Justin: Theme Thursday. And our theme is Customer Service. We’ve all wanted to either reach through the computer or reach through a phone and probably strangle someone who works for a company at one time or another because of bad customer service. But there is some exceptionally good customer service out there and one of those places would be Amazon.
Diana: Yes. Generally I have great experience with Amazon.
Justin: Exactly and they’re really known for their customer service. Now it’s not that you can actually call them because you really can’t call them and talk to someone but if you’re internet savvy and savvy enough to be using Amazon, you can speak with customer service pretty easily through chat and they respond very quickly. They’re known for their good customer service and of course, they have services like Amazon Prime.
Diana: Oh, yeah. We love that one.
Justin: Which is really great. You pay a membership by the year and you get unlimited free two day shipping.
Diana: I remember when this first came out we were a little skeptical.
Justin: Right. I was very skeptical. As I usually am with anything. I finally got on board after seeing it work for someone else. Actually, two or three people actually had to tell me about it and then I had to see it working but it really does work. They get things to you for that annual membership price. So if you buy a lot of things online because you can buy anything at Amazon. You can buy groceries even. You can get everything in two days. They are working in major cities already with an overnight or even same day guaranteed delivery from an Amazon fulfillment center. So if you’re in a major city you actually can get your order the same day you place it. Which is really crazy. We can’t do that in rural America but soon apparently…
Diana: Now this is exciting.
Justin: In four or five years they’ve just announced that they’re hoping to launch this new delivery service for Amazon Prime Air, is what it’s called.
Diana: Now, listen to this.
Justin: This is no joke. This is serious. This is serious.
Diana: This is crazy.
Justin: It is very interesting.
Diana: They are planning within four to five years, like you said, to make deliveries within 30 minutes of an online purchase.
Justin: Right. And you’re thinking, ‘How is that even remotely possible?’ Well, it’s not possible right now.
Diana: Four to five years out. So how do they plan to do that?
Justin: They plan to fly drones to fly products that are five pounds or less from one of the 96 warehouse locations to their purchase location because they do have warehouses in every state. And huge; they’re huge fulfilment centers that have most everything that you would want. If it’s five pounds or less they’re going to fly it via drone. Now, I’m very sceptical.
Diana: This sounds a little scary. But fun.
Justin: I’m very skeptical of this, honestly. Because any time that you start talking about implementing something so radical as things flying through the air there’s a lot of oversight that has to be done.
Diana: They haven’t fully tested it.
Justin: No. And it hasn’t even come up for any sort of approval from the FAA and I’m pretty sure the FAA will have them tied up in paperwork for probably ten years but it’s something interesting that they’re actually trying to do. Now, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO, says of course, like I just said, the hardest part here is putting in all the redundancies because they want to make sure it won’t land on someone’s head. Which is true. I personally think while it’s no joke he’s saying this is something I’d love to do and sometimes these really powerful CEOs, visionaries, actually challenge the government to say, ‘what will you let us do?’ So that’s an interesting thing.
Diana: I’m anxious to see.
Justin: So there’s some possibly really amazing customer service unless it lands on your head. Until next time.
Diana: Take care.
Justin: Tech Table is brought to you by MPA of Bloomfield, Iowa and God’s Country Radio. You can visit us online at askMPA dot com.
Diana: If you have questions or comments please send them to questions at askMPA dot com. That’s questions at askMPA dot com.
Justin: And thanks for listening.
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