At the end of every customer service interaction, Amazon customers are asked the same question: "Did I solve your problem?"
Screenshot from a chat with an Amazon Customer Service bot a few weeks ago
This question captures the heart of what customer service is intended to do — solve problems — and allows customers to provide a pass-or-fail grade in a quick, no-frills manner with a single word: "yes" or "no."
With a market cap of around 1.5 trillion and close to 200 million customers, it's fair to say that Amazon knows a thing or two (or three) about how to win customers over.
Quintessential to Amazon's goal of, in the words of its founder Jeff Bezos, "the earth's most customer-centric company" is almost certainly its obsession with understanding and improving how well the company is at solving its customers' problems.
Whether you're a company serving customers or an employee serving a team (internal customers), the key to achieving positive outcomes is the same: understand the customer's problems and pain points, seek to solve them, find a way to figure out in no uncertain terms if you are solving the problem, repeat.
Everything else is likely of secondary importance and, in some cases, an unhelpful distraction.
