Q&A with Russell Nickson on Customer Experience Management
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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.
Q&A with Russell Nickson on Customer Experience Management
- 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 1
- 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 2
- 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 3
- 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 4