I called American Express (Singapore) today (17 December 2013) to get a fee waiver on my Krisflyer card. The call had to be made and I was not anticipating anything that would suggest a 'happy experience'.
It turned out to be the most surprisingly pleasant CS experience I have not had for a long while, even by Amex standards. As a consumer, as well as a marketer, thought it would be useful to distill the cause of the pleasant experience into professional insight.
The success of that particular customer service call resulting in a great experience, is the result of 3 things:
1.) Understanding - enough information in real-time on their part to know my tenure, my payment history, and past request for waivers with the bank.
2.) Energy - the positive energy emerging from the other end of the phone line suggests someone who is friendly and warm but not overtly reading from a script. She is genuinely happy and helpful. This means, she must be happy working there. This, as I must say, is the result of a happy work culture. And the root cause is a great management & human resource ethic. (Or the person is simply just genuinely a happy gal.)
3.) Empowerment - she had the authority to 'give' the waiver. There was no need to 'put in the request' and 'wait for an answer'. She did not have the 'check with my manager'. This, is probably made possible due to a set of actionable guidelines and framework, so that a front-line staff is able to do so, in a control environment as such.
Great work on the CS side, Amex.
It turned out to be the most surprisingly pleasant CS experience I have not had for a long while, even by Amex standards. As a consumer, as well as a marketer, thought it would be useful to distill the cause of the pleasant experience into professional insight.
The success of that particular customer service call resulting in a great experience, is the result of 3 things:
1.) Understanding - enough information in real-time on their part to know my tenure, my payment history, and past request for waivers with the bank.
2.) Energy - the positive energy emerging from the other end of the phone line suggests someone who is friendly and warm but not overtly reading from a script. She is genuinely happy and helpful. This means, she must be happy working there. This, as I must say, is the result of a happy work culture. And the root cause is a great management & human resource ethic. (Or the person is simply just genuinely a happy gal.)
3.) Empowerment - she had the authority to 'give' the waiver. There was no need to 'put in the request' and 'wait for an answer'. She did not have the 'check with my manager'. This, is probably made possible due to a set of actionable guidelines and framework, so that a front-line staff is able to do so, in a control environment as such.
Great work on the CS side, Amex.
No comments:
Post a Comment