What’s that thing in the sky, flying around to deliver presents to good little boys and girls? You’re not hearing sleigh bells but the gentle hum of Amazon’s new drone delivery service. On Monday’s 60 Minutes, CEO Jeff Bezos introduced Prime Air, a fleet of robots capable of delivering packages of up to 5 pounds (like 86 percent of all orders) within a 10-mile radius. According to Bezos, customers will receive their orders within 30 minutes of their purchase.

While this sounds like Orwellian science fiction (how long until we’re getting traffic tickets from drone police?), Amazon assures us that this is real, and unmanned carriers could be as commonplace as mail trucks by 2017. “The hard part here is putting in all the redundancy,” Bezos said. “All the reliability to say ‘this can’t land on somebody’s head.’” What he means is that Amazon will have to navigate miles of federal aviation red tape before Prime Air can take flight.

Despite legal and regulatory hurdles, Amazon optimistically reports that its drone technology and infrastructure will be ready by 2015. Individual items will fly out from one of the company’s 96 massive warehouses - called “fulfillment centers”- at the click of a mouse button. And if other e-tailers or similar companies adopt this delivery method (think about fast food, instantly airmailed right to your doorstep), we may never have to leave our homes again.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has unveiled the unthinkable. Innovations in customer service have continuously propelled the company from an online bookseller to a dominant global marketplace. The Kindle HD’s Mayday feature - a single-click panic button that immediately launches a video live chat with tech support - reinforces the importance of instant connection with customers.

ActivEngage takes this same adaptive approach for our automotive shopper interactions. We constantly evaluate our live chat conversations and shopper navigation paths in an effort to learn more about how customers behave on dealer sites.

A final quote from Jeff Bezos: "If you want to continuously revitalize the service that you offer to your customers, you cannot stop at what you are good at. You have to ask what your customers need and want, and then, no matter how hard it is, you better get good at those things."

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