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American Express is famous for its customer service. To make sure the company stays on track, it's using automated data collection to monitor customer satisfaction levels.
Every year millions of people do business with American Express, a Fortune 50 company with more than 70,000 employees and $19 billion in annual revnues. To monitor and improve customer service, the company sends out more than one million surveys in 12 different languages every year.
Every survey has to be designed, processed and stored. This used to be an expensive and time consuming process with long lead times. Today, costs have been cut by more than $500,000 and lead times reduced from more than six weeks to just a few days using Cardiff Software's (888-254-8920) TELEform automated data collection system.
"The more research data we collect, the more valuable it is to American Express," says Michael Garguilo, project coordinator of American Express's Customer Process Listening department (CPL). "Automatic data collection enables large amounts of data to be collected very efficiently and economically, which means we can deliver more information to management faster and cheaper."
The major benefit, is better customer service, says Mark King, CPL's senior manager. "The focus on the customer is of paramount importance at American Express, and the measurement of the customers' perception of service delivery is visible at all levels of management."
In 1992, American Express management (through CPL) started surveying customer experiences when they contacted customer service about credit card issues, including denied charges, stolen cards and credit limit increases. They wanted to know if the experience was productive and pleasant and the way it affected customer perception.
A small number of one-page surveys were sent to customers who filled in the survey and returned it to American Express. These surveys were hand-- keyed by data-entry operators into a mainframe database that analyzed the data. Comments on the form were keyed separately into a FoxPro database so CPL...