At A Glance

Anindo Dey is the CEO of Alibris, a premier source for new and used books and media. Originally founded with an emphasis on rare and used books, Alibris has expanded over the past nearly 30 years to become a powerhouse in the industry. While they’re primarily focused on the American market, Alibris has a massive presence online, selling books through a variety of platforms, including Walmart, corporations, large distributors, libraries, and more, but the key to their message? Keeping the human touch. 

Who is Anindo Dey?

Meet Anindo Dey, the CEO of Alibris! 

About Alibris

Launched in 1997, Alibris was one of the pioneering companies in the book selling market, alongside Amazon. While Amazon expanded into a much broader market, Alibris stayed true to its roots, even as it began to diversify about 20 years ago. In fact, they’re now known as one of the last independent marketplaces for books and one of their top unique selling propositions is the fact that they’re not Amazon. It’s allowed them to continue to grow and that’s not all the company has to offer. 

Anindo’s CX Journey

Anindo has over two and a half decades experience in the publishing industry, beginning as an editor and worked as CTO for one of the largest publishing companies as well as working many years in technology before he was asked to take over Alibris. But he’s definitely familiar with the company, because he was working with the owner in a different capacity before a simple trip changed the course of their partnership, bringing Anindo over to Alibris instead.

The CX Factor

The most important factor when it comes to customer experience? For Anindo it’s responsiveness and treating every customer the same. No matter their name, country, background, or anything else, it’s essential that they all receive the same treatment and feel important every step of the way. And that has a lot to do with their stance on the human touch in their business. 

For Alibris, and specifically for Anindo, the key to a successful business that customers want to keep coming back to, is offering respect and empathy at every turn. That’s because Alibris doesn’t rely on AI and that’s a factor that Anindo doesn’t have any interest in changing. 

What does this look like in practice? It looks like giving customers the best possible treatment so that they know they’re important. One story that stands out is a customer who represented a library that had lost most of its collection due to flooding. As a result, they were looking to purchase large quantities of books in a short span of time, and they needed to receive those books quickly as well.

The customer’s highly complex order also had to be shipped to a remote area of the US and still be completed quickly. Not only was Alibris able to live up to the task, but they also gained a customer for life, because that customer came back to Alibris again even when she was later working with a different, and much larger, company. 

Setting themselves apart

By measuring customer feedback personally and offering each customer an individualized response from a real person, Alibris sets itself apart in the industry. And just how do they do that? By having a skilled, diverse team with representatives located around the world. 

While the core customer service team is in India, there are still plenty of team members elsewhere, which ensures customer queries can be answered even across time zones. 

Improving scalability

When it comes to continued improvement for Alibris the key is creating the right systems. And those systems need to be flexible, scalable and capable of absorbing the impact of both growth and decline. After all, there will always be periods of both, like Alibris saw in the time before and during COVID. 

What does that mean to Anindo? It means creating a system that doesn’t compromise on service levels of quality but continues to take care of each channel within the company. And all of it needs to be done following the best possible product delivery standards, service levels and more. 

The future of AI

One thing that sets Alibris apart from other companies in the e-commerce space is their stance on AI. Anindo doesn’t believe in mixing AI with customer service because it takes away the human touch and the personal approach of their interactions. Using bots might make the job faster, but it doesn’t improve the experience for the customer and that’s the most important thing. 

However, one aspect that Anindo does acknowledge they’re working on is ensuring not only unique responses to customer queries, but a fast turnaround on getting customer needs met. It’s the main focus that he’s putting on his customer service team going forward.