American Express

A couple of weeks ago I ran a short poll on this blog asking whether our experience with customer service had changed during the economic contraction.

The question was prompted by an experience I had with American Express that seemed very contrary to the brand promise of the company.

The results of this admittedly unscientific poll are below:

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75% of you seem pretty unimpressed with customer service:  34% feel like customer-service has fallen off recently and another 41% feel like customer service has never been consistent with the brand promises.

That’s a pretty unsatisfactory outcome.

In this period of economic challenges, customer service is a powerful point of differentiation that is within your control.  So much of customer service is about accessibility, culture and attitude.  With all of the communications challenges available to us today, we can create multiple points of contacts with consumers.

Customer service doesn’t mean that you resolve each issue in favor of the person who has reached out.  It does mean that every issue is resolved in a timely and personal fashion.

That way, customer service becomes a foundation element of the customer experience.

My orientation of customer service is rooted in my first experiences in business.  We had a small boutique newsletter and consulting firm that specialized in the impact of technology on the content business.  This is the mid-1980s, after the breakup of AT&T and during a period of innovation and expansion in the microcomputer industry and the business information industry.  All the change was driven by harnessing the power of micro-processors and shifting the channels of distribution for information.

Our business depended on high-value interactions:  A newsletter subscription was about $400 and a report sale was at least $1500.

Every single phone call mattered.

As a result, everyone answered the phone.  Every phone call an opportunity:  to learn some bit of information, to handle an order inquiry and, most importantly, to deal with a customer service issue.

If the phone rang more than 3 times and didn’t get picked up, we knew that we were doing something wrong.

Every person was required to get a name, title, company, address and phone number every time the phone rang.  We put this information into one single database — a rudimentary Professional Pro spreadsheet — and tracked it against orders and renewals.

The essence of our customer experience was engagement, curiosity and resolution.  Every single time.

That’s my expectation from a customer service organization.  At our company, with our 35,000+ customer relationships and the millions of pieces of content that we process and distribute every single month, I hope that we’re able to achieve some of that experience of customer service.  We believe that our culture gives people the opportunity to resolve issues and to feel satisfied with what they’ve been able to do.

Can I attest that we accomplish that consistently?  No.  And the very act of writing this post makes me think about ways that we should set out these expectations more clearly and measure more effectively.

That’s how you improve your customer experience.

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