American Express Reviews in Miami-Fort Lauderdale, FL Area

Pros

Overall great place to learn about and implement world class customer service. Blue box values are about integrity in business. Great opportunities for learning. They used to provide $5000 per year for employee education, maybe still do. Lots of empowerment for decision-making. Giving programs are established to benefit the greater community. Beautiful values.

Cons

Major drawback is politics that enable incompetent, lazy leaders to benefit from the system, promote their friends and hold back everyone else's growth. Another problem is lack of job security. Sweeping layoffs are followed by hiring at a lower pay rate.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay attention to the sloughs in management. They are using the system setup to benefit all for their own dysfunctional purposes. They can be liars and blamers and don't represent well. They are poor managers.

Pros

Benefits are great! Vacation time given, exceeds any other place I've worked for, plus you can schedule an extra week you pay for through a salary deduction. You can schedule and manage your off time or sick time from home.

Cons

Micro managed beyond belief! You are constantly under a microscope. It doesn't matter if your performance was at the top for the last year or 2, or 5, it's all about your performance that month. If you don't reach your goals, you''re treated as if it's your 1st day on the job! It's all about the surveys sent in by the customers. Your performance is based on those surveys even if it was out of your control. If the customer notes that they were unhappy with a long wait time on the phone and gave a score that was less then"excellent," your performance for the month goes down. "Very good" on a survey WILL bring your score down! Anything less than a 9 or 10 on customer satisfaction, will also bring your numbers down for the month. Also, at times a survey is meant for someone else. Your team leader will listen to the phone calls with poor scores, and even if determined that you are the wrongful recipient of a survey, you are stuck with it. It cannot be removed from your stats. Basically, your goals are numbers driven and most of the time, out of your control.

Advice to Senior Management

Please take the "very good" out of the surveys sent to the customer. Most people think "very good" is a great score. They don't realize it will impact the customer service rep's performance score. Also,stop basing the performance specifically on the survey scores. You know who the good employees are, you listen the the calls constantly! Look at the reason for the low scores. If the survey doesn't be long to the rep, or if the low score is out of their control, such as a long hold time, take those out of the rep's file.

Pros

Team and family members are always so helpful and willing to share to ensure that your success is golden

Cons

Can be stressful at times when our systems run slow you tend to get chewed out by cardmembers due to long hold times

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the good work as you all are always stressing the importance of advancements in our careers.....the motivation is outstanding

Pros

Company Heritage
Global environment an unique business model
Diversity of business lines and teams

Cons

Limited career development
Salary and compensation not necessary match the position scope and responsibilities
Lack of collaboration across business units

Pros

Good environment
Good benefits
Good work balance

Cons

Salary not that good
Old fashion mentality, squared

Advice to Senior Management

Need mentality change and open to new ways of thinking

Pros

A promising career that starts off great and offers quick advancement and pay; was promoted in less than a month.

Cons

Job would get highly stressful with high call volume, often left unsupervised and understaffed. Managers offered little advice on how to handle certain impossible situations.

Advice to Senior Management

Managers must be more lenient with changes in shifts, offer better resolutions for irate customers or apparent fraud. Also understaffed.

Pros

Bonus opportunity for good to great performance. Bonuses can reach several thousand every month. Lots of vacation time, more than any other co right off the bat. Expectations are clear and if you do your job, no one bothers you.

Cons

Too many changes in protocol. Change is very frequent and is not always communicated well. Direct leaders are not always knowledgeable and many lack basic leadership skills. Difficult to get schedules not including weekend hours. About twice a year entire departments bid for new schedules based on performance. if your performance is not top 25%. schedules very undesirable. Promotions are given as temporary positions. Many times they decide they do not want to make the position permanent, and you have to go back to your old job, even after 6 months or longer of being in the new position.

Advice to Senior Management

WIth many directives changing frequently, it is important that leaders stay up to date on what employees jobs entail. Also, pay more attention to the middle performers, so they can become high performers. Too much energy is spent on people who consistently don't perform.

Pros

- Lively
- Engaging
- Friendly people
- Work life balance
- Real life projects to work on
- Great brand name

Cons

- Poor Compensation
- Internal Politics
- Decisions are not made as fast as necessary
- Working from home is not encouraged
- Systems are very slow and archaic

Advice to Senior Management

Leadership at American Express is great. I really like the way senior leadership listens to new ideas from its employees. However it takes a long time to get things moving in the right direction. Too many approvals are necessary which slows down the project implementation. This means that it also prevents us from being no. 1 in the industry for delivering cutting edge services. It will be fantastic to see more investments to come into developing new technologies to enable card members use our products and services before the competition does it.

Pros

Great benefits starting day 1.

Cons

Doesn't compensate based on experience nor competence level.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay your people who do good work.

Pros

Fantastic benefits, Diversity, 24 hour center-many shifts available, Prestigious company, in-house clinic, back-up day care, great place to meet people, advancement possibilities

Cons

You only get a 40 minute lunch and two 10 minute breaks each day. The remainder of your 8.5 hour workday will be taking back to back inbound phone calls from customers. You cannot disconnect your phone, choose not to accept calls, or even go to the restroom during that time.

Advice to Senior Management

This is too taxing of a position to only have 1 hour off the phone. We're humans, not machines.