The Amazement Revolution Page 4
Bush is certainly happy about these developments, but he doesn’t seem greatly surprised by them. He appears to have virtually limitless faith in the transforming potential of an engaged workforce.
“By understanding that it’s a people business first and foremost,” he told me, “by investing in people, by creating performance management systems around those individuals that care for our customers, by defining what is right from a customer point of view and then rewarding the people who deliver on the outcome, we all learned that it’s amazing what you can accomplish as an organization. As we started to develop a more autonomous and empowered environment, I think all of us felt a sense of release. We in management had not really created anything new, but we had unleashed the power of these incredible professionals. Now they’re more than professionals, I think. They now pride themselves in being ambassadors of the American Express Company.”
How could you make FUN a part of daily working
life at your organization?
! ART #4: Give your people a greater sense of personal fulfillment by giving them the training and the autonomy they need to solve problems and make good recommendations. Don’t try to micromanage their every word and deed.
! ART #5: Respect and embrace the uniqueness of each of your employees.
! ART #6: Issue a professional challenge that inspires team players and makes them look forward to what’s next.
! ART #7: Ask your team what should change.
! ART #8: Don’t subsidize poor performance.
! ART #9: Throw away the script; give your people more autonomy to identify and solve problems.
! ART #10: Change internal job title terminology.
AMAZEMENT STRATEGY #3: CULTIVATE PARTNERSHIP
Close-up on Partnership
Deliver a premium level of service that incorporates active problem-solving and inspires customers to count on and return to
your organization.
When American Express’s customer care professionals not only take care of the initial reason for the call, but also empathetically ask about the cardmember’s business, travel, or other issues, they are becoming problem solvers. True partnership often begins with this kind of proactive problem solving—which means not merely resolving the existing issue, but looking for other problems to solve in such a way that the customer begins to expect and rely on that level of care. This is partnership; this is where we want the relationship to go. And it begins with being empathetic, emphasizing shared values, and being fully accountable for the situation at hand.
“I think what we have been able to do successfully,” Bush told me, “is use empathy to engage our employees in becoming part of the solution. That’s the first step. They can actively listen, they can understand and empathize with the tone of the cardmember or the merchant or whoever we’re talking with and attempting to serve; and through that assessment, they can determine then how the dialogue should go, listening for what’s most important to the customer, and then engaging the customer through that. Even a simple apology early on can get us to a position where we can resolve the issue—and then we build from there. Once we’ve resolved the initial issue, then we start to look for opportunities to serve our customers beyond that interaction, opportunities that may help us to deepen the relationship.
“We are always building upon a solution—by reinforcing value opportunities and by creating incremental value. We try to do that with every interaction we have. And we have hundreds of millions of interactions every year.”
In other words, once the customer care professional has worked with you to resolve your Moment of Misery, whatever it may be, he or she wants to use the positive emotional momentum of that experience to learn more about you—and find more problems to solve on your behalf. This high-level, aspirational partnership standard applies not only to American Express’s relationships with its external customers but also to the company’s relationships with internal customers (i.e., colleagues and coworkers) and, just as critically, with merchants (the vendor base). People within each of these groups have come to expect, not an absence of problems, but a higher level of problem solving from the American Express Company.
What if you viewed your customers’ problems, crises, and Moments of Misery as opportunities to establish higher long-term customer expectations from your organization?
! ART #11: Empathetically solve existing problems. Then proactively look for unanticipated problems to solve.
! ART #12: Use crises and Moments of Misery as opportunities to build or expand the partnership.
! ART #13: Strive for partner relationships with customers, with your employees, and with your vendors.
! ART #14: Wherever possible, identify and emphasize core values you share with your partners.
AMAZEMENT STRATEGY #4: HIRE RIGHT
Close-up on Hire Right
Create and implement innovative hiring and retention processes that support your service mission.
American Express took a long, hard look at the way the enterprise was staffing its call centers and decided that the processes it currently had in place simply weren’t keeping up with the competition. Contrary to what you might expect, though, its comparisons were not to the obvious competitors—Visa, MasterCard, or Discover Card.
The company chose to benchmark itself against organizations such as the Ritz-Carlton and the legendary Four Seasons hotels! So Bush and his team looked outside their own industry, to global leaders in the service field, for the hiring and retention processes they needed—and eventually they looked outside of their industry for the people they wanted to hire, as well.
As Bush put it: “We said, ‘It’s nice being the best in the credit card industry, but with all due respect, the credit card industry as a whole is not really viewed as being all that committed to service.’ So we challenged ourselves: How do you look at other industries to learn from what they do, who they employ, and how they engage? And we made some changes.”
Like other great service organizations I’ve worked with, American Express was willing to take a whole new approach to hiring and retention in order to deliver a better customer experience. Specifically, it was willing to recruit from an industry other than its own—the hospitality industry—and reassign or part ways with people who weren’t predisposed to deliver the empathetic level of service that supported the company’s mission.
“The fact that somebody has been in a call center,” Bush said, “does not make that individual the perfect match for what we’re trying to accomplish. Why? Because we’re talking about human engagement, and that requires the ability to connect. And hospitality, when you think about engagement, that’s exactly what those enterprises do.”
That’s how American Express began looking to a new profile for its customer-facing talent: direct customer-facing experience in service-driven hotels, restaurants, retail stores, and similar establishments. It began looking for an outgoing, empathetic, problem-solving attitude. Once it had identified the person who could support the organization’s service-first culture, and who brought the right experience and the right outlook on customer care to the workplace day after day, the technical skills could be added to the mix.
There was also a comprehensive overview of the compensation structure, ensuring that one of its key drivers was customer feedback.
What would happen if you looked in places outside of your industry and identified a new career profile for your customer-facing service professionals?
! ART #15: Look outside your industry for good talent.
! ART #16: Don’t be afraid to reassign (or part company with) people who don’t belong in customer-facing positions.
! ART #17: Periodically reevaluate your compensation system. Consider making customer feedback one of the major drivers.
AMAZEMENT STRATEGY #5: CREATE A MEMORABLE AFTER-EXPERIENCE
Close-up on After-Experience
A positive initial customer experience is only the beginning! Make sure your
organization gives people the flexibility to deliver a range of powerful, personalized after-experiences.
A while back, I called American Express and used their concierge service (a member amenity) to buy tickets for my mom to go to a Broadway show while she was on her vacation in New York City. I happened to mention to Tom, the customer care professional I was talking to, that the tickets were not for me. Tom immediately recommended that we set up the purchase so my mom could pick up the tickets at the ticket office in New York.
A few days later, I got a call back from the ticket merchant, updating me that Tom had alerted them to the fact that my mother would be stopping by the box office to pick up the tickets, and confirming for my convenience that this was the way I wanted the purchase set up!
Like a concierge at a great hotel, Tom had anticipated a potential problem and followed through. After he had hung up with me, Tom had foreseen that the box office might expect me to be present to pick up the tickets in person, which would have been a problem for my mother. (Typically, the member purchasing the tickets must pick them up and have the proper identification, which includes the same credit card used to charge the tickets and a driver’s license or passport.) Tom had contacted the vendor and requested that the vendor circle back with me to confirm that the arrangement he and I had discussed was in place. Rather than hang up with me and move on to the next customer—make that member—Tom took an extra step. Tom was looking out for me!
Here’s my question: What kind of working culture makes possible that kind of follow-through, that kind of positive after-experience?
The answer is, a working culture that doesn’t focus narrowly on “transactions.” Even after our call was completed, even after the “transaction” was over, I was still on Tom’s radar. The “transaction” was only a small part of a more important relationship. And that is exactly how American Express wanted it.
This kind of person-to-person follow-through—which goes way beyond the now-familiar call from a credit card company to confirm that a big, unusual purchase is actually legitimate—is not simple altruism. It has a profound bottom-line justification, as Bush explains: “Follow- through is part of the larger strategy of relationship care. That’s what really drives value for our organization, because it changes customer behavior in a number of positive ways: higher spending, faster payments from cardmembers, and an increasing number of merchants accepting the American Express card. All as a result of that person-to-person engagement with the customer care professional.”
How can your organization use follow-through to create a memorable after-experience?
! ART #18: There is no such thing as a transaction. The word transaction implies a clear starting point and an equally clear ending point. In the cult of amazement, however, any transaction is simply an interaction that leads to the next potential Moment of Magic.
! ART #19: Don’t pressure employees to close customer interactions before they have a chance to build a relationship with the customer.
! ART #20: There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to effectively follow through. Empower people to find some of them. Recognize and consider rewarding them when they do.
AMAZEMENT STRATEGY #6: BUILD COMMUNITY
Close-up on Community
Support and inspire both the internal and the external community of evangelists.
American Express uses a powerful combination of incentives, emotional connection, and good listening to support two distinctive communities of American Express “evangelists”: the internal community of American Express employees and the external community of cardmembers and merchants. Although these two communities are structurally very different, they are connected, and engaging on a person-to-person basis with members of each group is a central element of the company’s mission. Each feels a sense of community and belonging, and a sense of identity, as a result of that engagement.
While we were discussing the loyalty and high retention rates of his community of customer care professionals, Bush shared with me his view that the larger mission of making American Express the world’s most respected service brand has served as a powerful unifying force within the workplace. That mission, he said, had led to an important internal initiative: to win customers’ hearts and minds by delivering extraordinary care at the right margins.
“These are more than just pithy words on a sheet of paper,” Bush insisted. “This goal was internalized by tens of thousands of people who have passionately committed themselves to it. And the passion of our people is truly something remarkable. It’s amazing what happens when you enable people to do what they’re passionate about, how that translates into reality, both in terms of people’s own ability to succeed as professionals and in terms of the experience they commit, as a community, to delivering to our customers.”
In other words, the company’s internal community of service employees is now mobilized and emotionally engaged around an inspiring service goal—a goal that they feel they own, one that gives them a sense of identity and belonging. Whenever that happens, in my experience, good things tend to follow in the external community of customers. And that is exactly the result that American Express achieved.
As far as that community of customers (make that members) is concerned, they too show a sense of belonging and identity, as evidenced by their active evangelism on behalf of the company. Consider the following post from an American Express member’s personal blog, and notice how the first story involves a Moment of Misery that the company transformed into a Moment of Magic!
American Express is a great company. Not only have I been able to decorate my entire dining room using AMEX points, but I have had two recent experiences with AMEX that make me love them even more. A few weeks ago, (a family member’s) car broke down at our house. I called the AMEX roadside assistance service, and they dispatched someone to come tow the car. I was still waiting after an hour and a half, so I called AMEX again to follow up. The woman I spoke with was so great—she said that it was unacceptable that I had waited over an hour for the tow truck and that she would send another tow truck to our house as well as follow up with the first guy. I truly felt like a valued customer and loved it!
If that weren’t enough, I got a call on Friday from AMEX about a suspicious charge on my card. They had been monitoring my account and noticed that someone bought $488 worth of vitamins from an online vitamin distributor out of New Jersey. They had already suspended payment, and they closed my account in about 30 seconds over the phone. To top it off, I had a new card delivered to my door on Monday. Amazing! I know, I sound like a cheesy ad, but AMEX, you really are the best. I love you!3
Here you see the member evangelizing about American Express—not only to immediate family and friends, but to a potentially global audience. All the advertising in the world could not be more powerful than that! Over the last few years, as I have noted, the company has been recognized for excellence in service by J.D. Power and Associates, BusinessWeek, and other institutions. It’s worth noting that all of that recognition has been driven by the community of American Express members evangelizing on behalf of the company. The company did not apply for those awards! Central to all of that public recognition has been a service experience that inspires both loyalty and evangelism.
American Express creates and supports this community of evangelists via millions of interactions each year. Members’ willingness to recommend American Express to family and friends appears to be driven by three powerful factors:
A premier service experience
The belief that American Express is willing and able to resolve problems when they arise
The perception that the benefits offered by the company are superior to those offered by competitors
A 2010 J.D. Power survey of over 8,000 credit card users resulted in five stars, the best possible rating, for American Express in each of those three categories.4
“What more powerful marketing opportunity do you have,” Bush asked, “th
an when a customer refers you to a friend? That’s the most powerful viral marketing there is.”
How can you deliver a service experience that creates a sense
of belonging and identity?
! ART #21: Create goals that inspire and engage your internal evangelists (employees).
! ART #22: Develop value-added privileges, rewards, and amenities to offer your customers as a way to build community.
AMAZEMENT REVOLUTION STRATEGY #7: WALK THE WALK
Close-up on Walk the Walk
Acknowledge, model, and reward adherence to customer-focused values at all levels of the organization.
I like to describe the walk the walk strategy with the word congruence: the customer-focused values you communicate to people should match up with what you actually do. Other words that describe this state of being are authenticity and consistency, but I prefer congruence because it does a better job of conveying the crucial sense of values matching up, both internally and externally. Congruence means you’re doing something, not because someone else told you to, but because doing it is what you genuinely believe to be right, and you are therefore willing to be accountable for your actions in all situations.