Stefanie Amini: What can we learn from American Express about Customer Care

This is a guest post written by Stefanie Amini, a fellow customer service blogger.  As she describes it, her blog “is focused on Customer Service for the Instant Gratification era.  The ‘I want it now’ mentality. The faster the results, the better for everyone.” Find out more about Stefanie and her blog, I Want it NOW at the end of the post. 

 
Technology is rapidly evolving, and along with it marketing and the means of getting in touch with customers are evolving too. Nowadays, a successful selling strategy is no longer enough to attract customers’ interest on the long run, since more and more companies are resorting to it. By comparison, few businesses have witnessed the true power of customer care, and how a strong support team can make the difference between winning a customer and losing him. One of these businesses is American Express, a company which is constantly pursuing to find new means of enhancing its relationships with the customers. Next, we’ll describe you a few ways in which American Express has revolutionized the marketing game through customer support:

The net-promoter concept

Before 2005, the customer service at American Express (AmEx) wasn’t very different from what others had to offer. However, in that particular year Jim Bush was invested as the company’s marketing president, and he was the one to break the regular orthodox means of conversation into some more dynamic and flexible human engagements. Thus, instead of judging the quality of service reps by how quickly they managed to answer customers’ queries over the phone, he switched the style to the net-promoter score concept developed by Bain Fred Reichfeld. Basically, it all resumes down to a single question for the customer: “Would you recommend our company to a friend?”. By adopting this strategy, customers’ retention quickly went up, while the “bounce rate” went down.

New analytic software, no scripts

Thanks to the software implemented by Bush, every time a customer calls the service department, the service rep gets to see a list filled with all the information related to him/her, such as name, address, age, buying tendencies, and payment patterns. By taking advantage of these info, the employee has to guide on the conversation without being restricted to a script. Thus, if he discovers the opportunity to tell the customer about a new AmEx service or product which he isn’t aware of, it is possible for the customer rep to uncover the benefits of this service/product in a friendly and personal manner, one which is more likely to sell than a traditional-based script.

Additionally, the AmEx analytic software is capable to calculate and indicate on screen the likelihood for a customer to end the phone call, plus any other early warning signals which tell if he isn’t interested in the conversation anymore. When such case occurs, the employee has to dig for the customer’s underlying problem and try new ways of solving, as it has been previously instructed at training. AmEx aims to reduce customer’s phone stress this way, and their strategy seems to rejoice from an overwhelming success.

New employee training strategy

Since the way service reps interact with customers has been changed, they needed to be taught differently how to approach a phone call. Thus, Bush has brought a whole new meaning to employee training by basically reducing the technicality means to a human, friendly conversation which customers benefit from the most.

Bush said that he was inspired to approach this strategy as he witnessed how warm and interactive people at the hotels’ front desks were. He quickly adopted the same friendly means, only that in a virtual environment, leading to customers being treated in a more personal manner.

American Express’ strategy in terms of customer care quickly paid off, since lots of people are actually recommending the credit card company to friends and relatives from social networks, workplaces, neighborhoods and not only.

Stefanie Amini is the Marketing Director and Specialist in Customer Success at WalkMe, the world’s first interactive online guidance system.  She is chief writer and editor of I Want It Now, a blog for Customer Service Experts. Follow her @StefWalkMe