Amazon unveiled the Mayday button in 2013 to differentiate Amazon Fire tablets from the competition. And users loved the Mayday button, with a reported three-quarters of Fire HDX owners using it in the first year.
Mayday is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It is accessed by a dedicated button found right in the tablet’s Quick Settings menu. A tap on that button connects the user with a live support representative in 15 seconds or less, no matter what time or day of the year it is. Once connected, the user can see the support representative in a small window on their screen, and the representative can see whatever app or screen is on the user’s tablet. Support techs can guide users with visual cues and auditory prompts, and if those fail, they can even control the tablet remotely to resolve the issue.
But in June of 2018 Amazon killed the feature completely.
However the point that I want to make is that a feature that was geared towards tech support for a tablet ended up not just doing that but quite a lot of other things as well.
Heres an excerpt from the book Invent and Wander:The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, in which Jeff Bezos writes about the Mayday Button:
The Mayday Button
“Not only is the device awesome but the Mayday feature is absolutely FANTASTIC!!!!! The Kindle team has hit it out of the park with this one.”
“Just tried the mayday button on my hdx. 15 second response time … amazon has done it again. Thoroughly impressed.”
Nothing gives us more pleasure at Amazon than “reinventing normal”—creating inventions that customers love and resetting their expectations for what normal should be.
Mayday reimagines and revolutionizes the idea of on-device tech support.
Mayday is available 24/7, 365 days a year, and our response time goal is fifteen seconds or less. We beat that goal—with an average response time of only nine seconds on our busiest day, Christmas.
A few of the Maydays have been amusing.
Mayday Tech Advisors have received thirty-five marriage proposals from customers.
475 customers have asked to talk to Amy, our Mayday television personality.
109 Maydays have been customers asking for assistance with ordering a pizza. By a slim margin, Pizza Hut wins customer preference over Domino’s.
There are forty-four instances where the Mayday Tech Advisor has sung Happy Birthday to the customer.
Mayday Tech Advisors have been serenaded by customers 648 times.
And three customers have asked for a bedtime story. Pretty cool.
On a side note
Serenaded means to sing or play an instrument expressing love for somebody, especially for a woman while standing outside her window at night
So in conclusion, you can introduce features in your product/service with this obsession of serving your customers to the best of your ability. However, your customers can totally surprise you, pleasantly, by taking the feature to a totally new level.
