American Express Reviews in Phoenix, AZ Area

Pros

Great benefits and insurance
Great campus with perks and diverse workforce
Nice atmosphere

Cons

Salary is very low, bonus is offered every quarter for the first year, but after that it is gone.
Product being pitched is the same approach every single call, dialing for dollars gets tiring

Advice to Senior Management

Offer competitive compensation for ISE's in the Scottsdale area. I couldnt sustain my income for very long while working there

Pros

No doubt Good place to work.
You are appreciated for the good work (depends on the leader)

Cons

Benefits are not that great
Oppoortunities to advance the career are slim

Advice to Senior Management

Communication needs to be improved among the teams, not knowing direction of one team to another team where both needs to work hand in had to achive the common goal.

Pros

Great benefits, Flexible Schedule, Great Brand recognition.

Cons

Do not pay inside CAT team enough money compared to other inside sales roles.

Advice to Senior Management

If your looking for qualified "Sales people to fill your inside Sales teams its important that you understand that qualified sales people will not continue to work for such minimal compensation.

Pros

Pay is staggeringly good compared to other industries. It's a finance company, so of course they're doing well and they pay top performers (1 rating) handsomely with 20-30% bonuses - but basically you have to work two jobs worth of effort and hours to get it, so it's a bargain for Amex - effectively two head count for the price of one and a third with the rest striving for that bonus working equally as hard.

Cons

Outsourcing. You squeeze your talent so hard or shuffle them off to a vendor who then downsizes, cuts their pay, outsources their job, at the expense of the Americans in American Express.

Advice to Senior Management

Forcing every leader to make headcount targets for internal/external FTEs and then the onshore/offshore ratios... one size definitely doesn't fit all. Enjoy your short sighted quarterly profit focused mindset... will Amex see another 150+ years with these tactics? Doubtful over the long haul.

Pros

One of the few large companies with professional opportunities in the Phoenix area.

Cons

Limited for growth in finance in Phoenix.

Pros

Pay is better than a lot of industries in Phoenix. Benefit package started first day and they are good benefits. Vacation time is more than adequate.

Cons

The job is very stressful. In order to be in the top percentage you need to walk over your coworkers. Management does not care about employees. We are belittled and downgraded. Incentives were just changed due to the "value" your department has to the company. Shifts are changed roughly every 4 months. They seem to spend their time finding reasons to write you up for "infractions". That way they don't have to pay incentives.

Advice to Senior Management

Give some leadership training to management. You don't tell employees that they have no "value" to the company. This company needs to learn how to work as one. Champion/challenger leads to "lying, cheating and stealing".

Pros

Good work-life balance, generally very nice people with strong focus on customer service, very much concerned about the safety and security of its customers.

Cons

Since Amex values safety and security so much, it is extremely slow to change and adopt new technologies. This has been particularly true since Amex became an FDIC-regulated bank. There has been an interesting influx of new talent, new cultures and a Silicon Valley-type subculture with the new digital initiatives. It will be interesting to see whether that subculture influences the rest of Amex or if eventually gets shutdown.

Advice to Senior Management

Amex was obviously born out of NYC and there is great visibility and upward mobility being there. However, there's still a glass ceiling for employees who don't work in the Tower even though the vast majority of your employees are now based out of NYC.

Pros

Benefits-These were in transition and their health changed to a high deductible plan that wasn't popular. Have a lot of other good benefits available.
Good vacation package. You get a lot of time off.
Good retirement plan.
Good recogniton of peers and employees.

Cons

They let go of their bottom performers. You can do great for years and if you have a couple bad months you are let go. You have to be very disciplined to work there. There are a lot of unrealistic goals set by the company. You're calls are timed and you get scored poorly if you get customers that ask a lot of questions.

Advice to Senior Management

Be realistic about the calling metrics.

Pros

The salary was fair...the average ranges from 12.00-15.00 depending on your experience. Good cafeteria. vacation hours (about 280) are given to you almost immediately, which can be dangerous because if your department isn't busy you can pretty much schedule a vacation day within a half hour and leave. they have a sweet scheduling system that lets you schedule single or multiple vacation days and you can keep pretty close track of your time and sick time as well. Most managers and co-workers really do want to help you, managers want to help "develop" you and get you promoted because of course it looks good for them too.

Cons

For me it was the repetition of the same call all day that grinded me down. Also the constant surveillance, they have very advanced tracking systems for their calls, they have screen and audio capture so they can pull ANY call from ANY day and see exactly what you did and said. You are required to clock in and out on your phone from every break and when you come in and when you leave at the end of the day. most team leaders have to meet with the department heads weekly and some only monthly depending on their teams performance. I think for this reason all team leads have an excel worksheet for all of their teammembers outlining every "metric" you meet and don't meet.

Advice to Senior Management

Get outta my face

Pros

Amex has good on boarding process. Managers believe in promoting employees to strive to better heights with the organization

Cons

some business units work in silos. The management team as a whole is not always on the same page. Company changes do not always flow down to support teams.