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Jeff Bezos keeps his Amazon email address public—here’s why

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
Alex Wong | Getty Images

Billionaire Jeff Bezos tells CNBC Make It that he has a public Amazon email address to field customer feedback and complaints. At least, that's according to an email received from his account, jeff@amazon.com, that was signed "Jeff."

"Yes, correct. I still see a lot of them," Bezos wrote in an email to CNBC Make It on Monday, referring to customer emails going to that account.

So as the world's richest person and a CEO, why bother with an account that must get a mind-boggling number of emails?

"I treat every problem that I hear about from a customer as an opportunity to improve," Bezos said in the new book, "Invent & Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos," which is a collection of Bezos' writings, including his shareholder letters and speeches.

Though jeff@amazon.com is Bezos' primary email address, he can't read all the emails he gets there himself, "I see a lot of them, and I use my curiosity to pick out certain emails," Bezos said in the book.

Bezos said a majority of the emails he gets from customers are complaints: "That's usually why people are writing us — because we've screwed up their order somehow."

And Bezos takes those emails seriously. For example, if he gets a complaint about a defect, he'll ask his team to do a case study and find "the root cause or causes." And then "do real root fixes," he said in the book.

"So then, when you fix it, you're not just fixing it for that one customer. You're fixing it for every customer, and that process is a gigantic part of what we do. So if I have a failed order or a bad customer experience, I treat it just like that," Bezos explained.

CNBC Make It emailed Bezos from an NBCUniversal email address at 10:20 a.m. (EST) on Monday and got a response from him 10 minutes later.

Correction: This story has been corrected to reflect that "Invent & Wander" is a collection of Bezos' writings, including his shareholder letters and speeches and that jeff@amazon.com is his primary Amazon email address.

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