American Express differentiates itself through its Relationship Care customer experience philosophy. Customer Care Professionals are trained to understand each customer's complete situation and needs in order to provide tailored service beyond just solving problems. This approach has increased customer satisfaction, retention, and spending. American Express measures customer feedback across all channels to ensure consistent, high-quality service and uses feedback to compensate and train employees. Investments in technology and training help deliver on the Relationship Care vision.

1. How American Express’ Customer Experience Goes
The Extra Mile
Russell Nickson, World Service SVP JAPA, American Express
From a customer’s perspective, how does American Express’ CEM differentiate
you from your competitors?
American Express has been around for 160 years and the reason we have been
successful is because of what the brand stands for – service, trust and integrity around
the world. Our vision is to become the world’s most respected service brand and we
provide extraordinary customer care through a global organisation at American Express
that we call World Service. Each year we serve billions of customers around the world,
through a variety of servicing channels, including phone, voice response, e-mail, the
Internet, selected social media, and text messaging.
Our CCPs follow a simple service philosophy: “Relationship CareSM” – to treat every
customer interaction as a relationship -- not just a transaction, or a cost. Rather than
simply using robotic scripts and focusing on the transaction at hand – our frontline
employees – we call them Customer Care Professionals (CCPs) - seek to broadly
understand the needs of the Cardmember. We want to understand the customer’s
situation and all of their relationships with American Express.
With Relationship Care, our Customer Care Professionals don’t just respond to a
customer’s question or solve their problem. They go the extra step of offering the
customer tailored information about how they could get more out of their card, like
earning additional Membership Rewards points by shopping at specific merchants, or
taking advantage of a Cardmember discount at a new restaurant in their
neighbourhood.
Since we’ve integrated Relationship Care into our culture, we have found that a
customer is far more likely to say they would recommend American Express to a friend.
We are seeing increased performance and, in turn, profitability, as we continue to invest
in our front line. In fact, Cardmember attrition is significantly lower among our
“promoters” and they rate us highly on recommend to a friend. At the same time, our
Cardmember spending is higher among those who are “promoters” and rate us highly
on recommend to a friend. Clearly, a unique service ethos or philosophy, that works.
How do you ensure service delivery consistency across all touchpoints?
American Express’ aim is to provide superior service around the world – or
extraordinary customer care as we call it - at every touchpoint. Whether that be via
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2. phone, voice response, e-mail, the Internet, selected social media, or text messaging.
We measure the effectiveness of the service we have provided in all customer
interactions to develop the best metrics to gauge and improve the customer experience.
Internally, Voice of Customer Measurement is an important process to help drive our
business goals. We measure our performance against what our customers say about us
– not what we thought constituted a great service experience.
By implementing a Relationship Care philosophy we moved from the robotic scripts and
let our customers decide how much time they wanted to spend on the phone with us.
We shifted away from ‘internal quality monitoring’ and launched Recommend to a
Friend. RTF is a new metric based on Net Promoter scores, where we tie a customer’s
satisfaction with a specific call back to the actual representative that took that call. Our
Customer Care Professionals are no longer rated on what they say or how fast they
complete the transaction. Now, it’s about what the customer says.
Our CCPs earn variable compensation based on their ability to drive customer
satisfaction on every call – we ensure that our top performing Customer Care
Professionals have additional opportunities to increase their total compensation. Our
direct customer feedback also drives coaching on how to continually improve the
customer experience. We believe there is no better way to improve the customer
experience than by acting on each and every point of customer feedback.
There’s enormous pressure on CEM departments to succeed – this normally
requires funding, so how do you prove an internal case for CEM to secure funds?
Service is our biggest competitive advantage; it is core to our brand and who we are as
a company. Our CEO, Ken Chenault views ‘Delivering Superior Service’ as a critical
part of our company’s mantra – namely that we focus on service and continue to deliver
more value and deepen relationships with our customers. Winning our fourth
consecutive JD Power award in 2010 for highest customer satisfaction, as well as
similar awards around the world, is one sign of our progress. And in 2011, we will stay
focused on the customer experience and continue to make investments in our servicing
network and capabilities that will better enable us to serve customers how, where and
when they want.
Our service enhancements also involve investments in technology. These investments
have allowed us to give our Customer Care Professionals some of the tools they need
to be more efficient and effective. Our aim is to be able to deliver an integrated and
consistent service experience for our customers across all channels and processes –
something they expect us to be able to do.
As an example, we redesigned some of the online tools our Customer Care
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3. Professionals use to enable Relationship Care. Now they can access a web-based
information portal that shows the relevant benefits and services that they can speak to
the Cardmember about. Our Customer Care Professionals have access to a range of
relevant benefits, features, and special offers allowing them to quickly and easily
provide relevant suggestions to customers.
Relationship Care also has had a positive impact on the bottom line for our
shareholders. Since we’ve integrated Relationship Care into our culture, we have found
that Cardmember attrition is significantly lower among our “promoters” and they rate us
highly on recommend to a friend. At the same time, our Cardmember spending is
higher among those who are “promoters” and rate us highly on recommend to a friend.
In fact, our Recommend To a Friend scores for JAPA are around 1600 basis points (for
the period January to December 2010) because of Relationship Care
We’re driving an experience that makes the customer feel better about American
Express, which is brand building, and ultimately creating economic value by increasing
customer loyalty and engagement which increases shareholder value.
What investments have you made in training your customer service employees?
Providing extraordinary customer care is a priority at American Express. We focus on
hiring, training, and retaining customer care professionals who can truly deliver on our
vision of becoming the world’s most respected service brand.
As part of our Relationship CareSM ethos, we have created a comprehensive training
program designed not only to ensure we’re meeting the needs of our customers, but
also to develop the next generation of leaders. The program builds on our established
and proven customer service training by focusing on building relationships or emotional
connections with cardmembers.
We have a course titled “Delivering Extraordinary Service” which is focused on creating
differentiating experiences to surpass our customers’ needs. In this course, we look at
the key components of delivering an extraordinary experience as defined by our
customers.
“Relationship Care SM” is the natural successor to “Delivering Extraordinary Service” and
focuses on tangible ways in which Customer Care Professionals can build relationships
with Cardmembers rather than focusing on the transaction at hand – therefore seeking
to broadly understand the needs of every Cardmember.
All members of our contact centres have completed both courses and all New Hire
delegates experience both trainings within their first week within the Organisation.
Further to the two courses, our Customer Care Professionals are then further developed
through additional learning electives and a continued focus on Coaching to Relationship
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4. Care, delivered by our experienced Team Leaders within the operational environment.
Russell Nickson is the World Service SVP JAPA at American Express. He’ll be
presenting at the Customer Experience Management 2011 as part of a panel
discussion. For more information about the event, please visit
www.CustomerExperienceEvent.com.au or call +61 2 9229 1000. Or you can email
enquire@iqpc.com.au
Don’t forget you can also follow us on Twitter via @IQPC_Australia
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