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In the early years of Amazon, Jeff Bezos would regularly send internal emails with just a single character.

A question mark.

These emails are now part of Amazon lore, and many businesses could learn a lot from the principles behind.

The ‘?’ emails were symbols of customer obsession and internal short-form for 'Why did this happen, and how can we prevent it from happening again?'.

The emails were typically triggered by a negative customer experience or a complaint, and Amazon leaders would *obsess* about their response.

The key was ‘root cause resolution’.

This meant *fully* understanding what caused the problem, completing a thorough deep dive investigation and continuing to ask ‘why, why, why’ until you were absolutely sure you had identified a permanent fix.

This approach isn’t unique to Amazon… but so often businesses stop at the *first* cause rather than the true *root* cause.

Just think how often you hear complex issues explained as ‘human error’, rather than the relevant leader truly understanding what changes are required in systems, tools, and processes to prevent that human error from happening again.

The root cause approach obviously takes more time and resources up front, but it significantly reduces the risk of teams having to deal with the same issue multiple times.

… and, more importantly, it leads to far better customer experiences.