The Amazement Revolution Read online

  Managers must pay close attention to what is happening inside the organization, because the quality of their interactions with front-line people will determine the quality of the organization’s interactions with customers.

  The very first role model you will learn from—American Express—proves that any organization, including a global financial services giant, can make the Employee Golden Rule a driving operating principle of the enterprise. As you’ll learn in the next chapter, constant improvements in the internal culture have made this company a global leader in the area of customer service.3

  PART TWO

  THE MASTER CLASS

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE MASTER CLASS:

  AMERICAN EXPRESS

  In the chapters that follow, I spotlight each of the seven Amazement Strategies and offer operating examples and Amazement Revolution Takeaways (ARTs) from real-world organizations. To start, I want to give you a detailed “master class” in amazement by profiling, in depth, one world-class service organization that has led the way for the rest of us by implementing all seven of the Amazement Strategies throughout the enterprise and living them as operating principles on a daily basis. That organization is the diversified global financial services company American Express.

  Amazement Revolutionary: American Express Company

  Enterprise Focus: Financial services

  Headquarters Location: New York, NY

  Website: www.americanexpress.com

  What You Need to Know: Founded in 1850, today American Express has over 58,000 employees. Famous for its credit card, charge card, and traveler’s cheque businesses, American Express cards deliver 24% of the total dollar volume of credit card transactions in the United States. BusinessWeek ranks American Express as the twenty-second most valuable brand in the world; Fortune lists American Express as one of the top thirty most admired companies in the world; and as of this writing, J.D. Power and Associates has ranked the company as highest in customer satisfaction among credit card issuers for four consecutive years.

  The selection of American Express as a primary role model is based on this organization’s demonstrated record of service excellence (which has been verified by BusinessWeek, J.D Power and Associates, and many other sources in recent years) and my own extensive research into the company’s mission, culture, and operating principles. Once I had formalized the seven Amazement Strategies, my team and I did a great deal of research and undertook a series of detailed discussions with many key people within the company. After looking at hundreds of other businesses, our conclusion was that this organization is truly among the elite Amazement Revolutionaries. Very few established companies have completely internalized all seven of the basic Amazement Strategies we identified. American Express is definitely one of those companies!

  What struck me was not merely the commitment of senior executives to raise American Express’s game to a higher level, but the sheer speed with which a Fortune 500 company was able to mobilize and make the internal changes necessary to sustain and support an ongoing Amazement Revolution. As you will learn, the new internal initiatives that drove this revolution began only about five years ago.

  Given the short timeline and high level of achievement, I believe American Express has successfully launched one of the most remarkable internal-service culture revolutions in the history of American business. As Jim Bush, the company’s executive vice president of world service, is quick to point out, the changes that have played out in recent years are completely consistent with the company’s 160-year legacy of service and innovation.1

  As we spoke during our interview, I often got the feeling he and his team had been implementing precisely the same system I had been developing and refining over twenty-five years of work in the field of customer service! They had not been using my notes, of course, but rather implementing the same timeless strategies shared by all truly great service organizations. The core strategies go by many names. It’s not what you call them that really matters, but whether you put them into practice.

  Let’s look at the seven Amazement Strategies now. You will notice that many of them, when followed to their logical conclusions, connect to and dovetail with other strategies on the list. Whatever names you give these ideas, you will find that they form an interlocking, self-sustaining set of core principles that are both easy to remember and easy to return to, day after day.

  AMAZEMENT STRATEGY #1: PROVIDE MEMBERSHIP

  Close-up on Membership

  Shift your mindset to treat the people you serve more like members rather than customers. What would you do differently?

  American Express doesn’t have customers or users or clients. American Express has members. Every single holder of an American Express card is a “cardmember.” Many of those members can quickly tell you, without even looking at the date on their card, exactly how long they’ve been a member. And the entire organization is oriented toward communicating with, engaging, and serving those members.

  The specific concept of membership began in 1963, when American Express first began embossing those “member since” dates on their charge cards. The larger idea of defining a premium level of experience, one reserved exclusively for people who choose to work with American Express, really does have its roots in a premium-service ethic. “We’re here to help,” Bush told me. “That goes back to the start.” That ethic has been part of the organization’s legacy, and its chief competitive advantage, since the company’s founding in 1850.

  The American Express Company began life as an elite express shipping service. Back then, its role and mission was to “Forward Merchandise and Money, Collectibles with Goods, Notes, and Drafts, throughout the State of New-York, the Canadas, and all the Western States and Territories…Each Express in charge of a Special Messenger.”2 The service-driven company prospered—and innovated. In the 1880s it offered its mobile, worldly, generally upscale clients a revolutionary new solution to the frustrating personal challenge of not being able to make purchases easily while overseas: the traveler’s cheque. The rest, as they say, is history.

  In recent years, CEO Kenneth Chenault has reinvigorated the brand by inspiring a new generation of true believers to live up to American Express’s lofty history—and its tradition of high service standards. Bush is one of those true believers. He proved that much during our conversation by returning over and over again to three critical themes that support the central service concept of membership as it is lived out every day at American Express.

  Don’t Think of Them as Customers—Think of Them as Members

  “By putting that ‘member since’ date on our cards,” Bush told me, “we create membership, and membership is something that our cardmembers treat as a badge of honor. It’s not elitist. It’s inclusive. It means they are appreciated, that they have the right, and expect, to be served in a premium fashion. As long as we treat them like members in high regard, we believe cardmembers will maintain their relationship with American Express. Our job is to continue to service the needs of all our customers who rely on us as a premium service experience organization.

  “In fact,” he continued, “we don’t really think of ourselves as a credit card company at all. We actually view ourselves as a premium service company. We are really in the services business. We happen to facilitate payments. But it’s the experience around those payments that makes what we do unique and special for our cardmembers.”

  What would happen if you stopped thinking of the people who do business with you as “customers” and started thinking of them—or even referring to them—as special individuals who occupied a special category? What would you do differently?

  Offer Members Exclusive Amenities

  A central part of the membership experience at American Express is being offered amenities that nonmembers don’t have access to. “With the goal of membership in mind,” Bush explained, “we offer the finest, most powerful rewards program in the world, with a host of rewards that emphasize th
e importance of membership.”

  Those rewards include access to fine dining through some of the company’s premium card offerings, the ability to get tickets for exclusive theater engagements, and access to airport clubs for frequent travelers. Hundreds of other such amenities are tangible benefits of membership. And the sheer range of benefits American Express offers day after day, around the world has been impossible for other players in the credit card industry to duplicate. The right amenities can take the membership experience to another level, one that makes your enterprise unique.

  What amenities could you offer people that are exclusive to working with you or would be difficult find to elsewhere?

  Invest in the Membership Experience

  Jim Bush repeatedly emphasized one point during our interview: American Express sees delivering premium service to its cardmembers not as an expense but as a critical strategic asset, one that pays back handsomely in both the immediate future and the long run. Accordingly, the company welcomes opportunities to invest in improvements in the quality of its membership experience.

  “Service is the most powerful competitive advantage we have,” Bush told me. “Service is not a cost, it is an investment. It’s a growth engine for our company. Service is one of our most powerful channels of growth opportunity. Service is value creation. Service is using human interaction to enable mutual benefit, and not only are we willing to make that investment, we are really proud of our investments in service. In an age when service is perhaps at its lowest ebb, when there’s basically a vacuum, regardless of where you go in the world, we’re proud of the role we can play to fill that void. From our perspective, there’s no time better than the present to capitalize on our greatest asset—by investing in the level of service that supports the experience we deliver.”

  No, this isn’t just talk. When it comes to investing in the membership experience, Bush and his leadership team have been instrumental in making absolutely sure that American Express puts its money where its mouth is. As you will see when we examine the next Amazement Strategy, FUN, Bush and his team engineered a complete overhaul of the enterprise’s training, recruitment, and customer service functions to lead an internal Amazement Revolution that has paid handsome dividends in the marketplace.

  How can you invest in and improve your organization’s membership experience?

  ! ART #1: Start thinking of your customers as members of a special group; consider a change in the labels you use to describe them, both internally and externally.

  ! ART #2: Brainstorm ways to deliver amenities that will take the customer experience to another level.

  ! ART #3: Invest in creating the membership experience.

  AMAZEMENT STRATEGY #2: HAVE SERIOUS FUN

  Close-up on FUN

  Real FUN in the workplace is determined, not by how many belly laughs your enterprise generates, but by the level of fulfillment it generates in the workforce, the uniqueness it respects in each employee, and the sense of anticipation it creates for the next challenge on the horizon.

  Leaders at many organizations—indeed, leaders at most organizations—pay lip service to the principle that customers “come first,” are the “reason we’re here,” and so forth. Then those very same leaders continue an old habit: ignoring the real-world, day-in/day-out workplace experience of the employees who are supposed to deliver all that great service. It doesn’t add up.

  American Express’s stated goal is to become the world’s most respected service brand—and Bush and his management team knew that the company’s legacy of service-driven innovation demanded a different approach. They knew that any successful revolution always begins from the inside.

  Bush and his team launched that revolution using a strategic weapon I call Serious FUN. That’s my terminology, not Bush’s, but he and I are in complete agreement about the importance of the three elements I use to define workplace FUN: personal fulfillment in the job; a working environment that respects each employee’s uniqueness; and a sense of escalating challenge that always leaves people looking forward to the next challenge, whether that means the next project, the next day at work, or the next rung on the career ladder.

  By embracing all three of these values in its call center operations, American Express proves that a corporate giant really can create FUN in the workplace.

  As Bush put it, “Sometimes people say, ‘You’ve got to make people happy.’ Well, we do want to stimulate people, but we want to give people the opportunity to be energized, to be engaged, in a way that will make happiness on their own terms possible. The goal is to not just make people happy as though they were simply being entertained.

  “A lot of people are energized by a challenge,” he went on, “which is great. But what we found was, for a while there, we were subsidizing poor performers, and that was as frustrating to the people on the team as anything else. By addressing all of that, we’ve created a highly engaged, very assertive workforce that’s committed to both individual development and to achieving the collective objectives.”

  Faced with the task of reinvigorating its call center workforce, American Express used a novel tactic. It actually asked the people who worked in the call centers what was important to them.

  “A few years ago,” Bush explained, “we went out and we asked our front-line people questions. We asked: ‘What is important to you to drive an experience that would get our customers to recommend American Express to a friend? What is required for you to be successful, for you to achieve your potential, for you to excel?’ That survey mechanism went out to the front-line leadership, and to the people who were actually working on the front lines. The answers that came back covered five major themes. One answer was people wanted to be compensated fairly. Another was that they wanted to be recognized for the important role they play. A third response was that they wanted a career path and they wanted the opportunity to develop as professionals. Fourth, they wanted flexibility. They felt like they deserved not to be held to a rigid schedule, and they wanted flexible scheduling with their colleagues, so they could swap shifts to meet the ever-changing needs of their family life. And fifth, they wanted the tools necessary to be successful.”

  American Express senior management concluded those were all fair things to ask for. They have stayed focused on and continuously invested in those five aspirations, identifying and meeting the needs their front-line people identified.

  “As part of the recognition of their concerns,” Bush recalled, “we changed the job title. We said, ‘Let’s stop calling them reps. Let’s stop calling them agents. Let’s call them what they are.’ And ‘customer care professional’ seemed to be more accurate as a title. We validated that through some focus groups with our front-line people. And that change in terminology has worked out very well.”

  Something else that worked out well involved a substantial financial investment: a complete overhaul of the call center priorities, from recruiting to training to compensation, in keeping with the request for better workplace tools and rewards. Bush made sure those changes happened.

  To understand the Amazement Revolution that took place in his corner of American Express, you have to understand how impersonal and demotivating most call centers are for the people who work in them. Most call centers hire people with call center experience. These people are given metrics, and they are evaluated based on their ability to deliver those metrics. They’re supposed to keep coming back to a certain script, or use the customer’s name three times within the first sixty seconds, or keep the call under a certain amount of time, or talk to a certain number of people per hour.

  Not surprisingly, when applied to a sea of potentially stressful calls with customers, standards like these burn out a lot of call center employees (and let’s face it, a lot of customers, too). The turnover rate among employees at these call centers is quite high, often more than 100% annually.

  American Express decided to take a different tack—by changing the hiring and recruiting philoso
phy (see Amazement Strategy #4: Hire Right, on page 35), by de-emphasizing the metrics, by training its people in generally unscripted “soft skills” such as listening and relationship building, and by investing in new technologies that enabled customer care professionals to make better customer-specific product and service recommendations during the calls. Instead of simply trying to shorten call times, the company made the strategic decision to use the calls to improve the quality of person-to-person connection with cardmembers. To do this, the company hired, trained, and motivated its customer care professionals to be better, more autonomous improvisers, a major change in workplace culture that gave front-line people much more control over the direction of the call.

  “Three or four years ago, we spent 70% of our training on what screen to find and button to push,” Bush said. “Now we spend 70% on how to service customers and how to work at a company with a service heritage like American Express. Anyone can learn the screens, but we’re not in the screen business.”

  Since Bush and his team made these changes and others, American Express has seen a rise in cardmember awareness of its varied products and service offerings. That improvement has been accompanied by a strong upward trend in customers’ overall satisfaction with the company. At the same time, the company’s call center retention rates have improved. Turnover among these employees is now below the industry average!