Behind The Scenes At An American Express Call Center

Fortune:

FORTUNE -- Call-center customer service has become a finely honed discipline, but usually it seems honed to cut time: The agent is superficially friendly, but nothing can derail that person's mission of getting you off the phone fast. Service at American Express (AXP) wasn't much different from that before Jim Bush was put in charge of it in 2005. His basic insight was that breaking with industry orthodoxy by transforming those conversations into less structured, more human engagements would pay off. Instead of evaluating service reps mainly by how quickly they got you off the phone, as many companies still do, he switched to the net promoter score developed by Bain's Fred Reichheld. It's based on one question: Would you recommend this company to a friend? AmEx's score has risen significantly under Bush's direction, and he was right -- it pays off. Customer spending is up, attrition is down.

Bush, 54, majored in accounting at New Jersey's Rider University. As AmEx's executive VP of world service, he oversees some 20,000 employees, about a third of the company's total. He talked recently with Geoff Colvin about how the company has changed the way it trains service employees, the power of personality, turning collection calls into positive experiences, and much else. Edited excerpts:

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Comments

[RonK Michigan]

07:17 AM on 04/20/2012

This IS the best Credit Card Company in the world and over the years, I have had a bunch of them. I have NEVER had a problem with them. While true, this card is not accepted everywhere in the USA, overseas acceptance is pretty universal. Customer service (even before 2005) has always been fantastic..........
Member since 1979

[beckola]

01:07 PM on 04/19/2012

I have a friend who works in the AMEX call center. It is a very hard job, talking to 100+ people every day on the phone, solving their problems to their satisfaction. What she dislikes most is that she can give exemplary service, get nine excellent customer survey reviews, and then get a bad one because she could not lower a customer's interest rate or raise his credit limit--something she cannot override in the system. Then she gets a zero, and the other nine excellents, and her resulting monthly bonus, are diminished greatly through the formula AMEX uses. Basically, for every one zero, she has to get 100 excellents to pull up to the equivalent of ten excellents and no zeros. She said the turnover is tremendous.