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Showing posts from September, 2010

AMAZON + AMEX: AN UPDATE ON AREAS FOR SERVICES IMPROVEMENT

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Here follows an overview of what happened since my article from last week. American Express Immediately the person who is responsible for social media reacted via Twitter. She put me in contact with their @askamex people to help me further. She was very helpful and did find out that there was indeed a software problem (Safari and Chrome access didn’t work). That is what I told the Amazon people in the first place, but they wouldn’t listen. Then she said that she could not assist me any further as my card was issued in the EU and she could only work with US issued cards. As a global customer however I expect global, seamless service. But that is not the way they are currently organized. So, I would suggest renaming their account into @AskAmexUS. Amazon Via Twitter I did receive no reaction at all, although I copied them on my Tweets. Also there was no reaction to my negative ratings on their service performance. So, why do you ask your customers about their satisfaction, when you

AMAZON’S Backlog in Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company

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Last week I did read an article in TechCrunch that Amazon now accepts American Express membership rewards points for purchases on Amazon.com. Well this is good news, I thought, as I have quite some points to use. So, I logged into the specific page on Amazon to link both accounts. I just had to fill in a few details regarding my American Express account and then hit the last button ‘Link rewards account’. But........ nothing happened, I expected a confirmation page which tells me that everything is linked now, but no reaction at all. I could only see that my cursor was back at the place where I first provided my details. So, I tried again and again, but every time no result. Pff, this was frustrating. While I was so happy with the possibility of buying books from my points. What to do next? I had to get in touch with customer service. This is where we get in an area where there is a huge opportunity for improvement. It is very difficult to find a way to email/contact customer serv

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM OUTLIERS AND ICONOCLASTS

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In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement. The emerging picture from studies is that then thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a worldclass expert – in anything. So, you need to have parents who encourage and support you. You can’t be poor. But before we can become an expert, someone has to give you the opportunity to learn hw to be an expert. What truly distinguishes outliers is not their extraordinary talent, but their extraordinary opportunities. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up. IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability. But social savy is knowledge. It’s a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from