Have Empathy for Your Customers and They’ll Have Empathy for You

A colleague of mine shared a story recently about his relationship with American Express. And to me it sounded more like the relationship he might have with a good friend, rather than with a charge card vendor. 

He has always been financially disciplined, he said, and he’s never carried a balance on his credit card. He has always insisted on living within his means, and so one advantage, to him, of carrying the Amex card, was to enforce that fiscal discipline. 

Over the years, he enjoyed more and more benefits from American Express, eventually making an economic decision to upgrade to the Platinum Card, for all the benefits it offered, including not just the “white gloves” service that Amex provides to Platinum cardholders, but also the $200 annual travel credit, 20% back on redeemed points, access to airport lounges, and no foreign transaction fees.

He carried a back-up Visa card, but his loyalty to American Express became so great that he rarely bought from vendors that didn’t accept Amex.

His Visa was a United Mileage Plus card which earned him mileage points on United Airlines, but he only used it either when Amex wasn’t accepted, or when he was buying air travel on United (because of the free baggage, extra miles and early boarding, which guaranteed that he would have access to overhead space).

And then my colleague said he took a new job, and his employer required that he put all his business expenses on a corporate Amex card. So now he was in a conundrum.

In my friend’s words,

“I made two phone calls:

1. First I called United about the fact that I MUST use a corporate card for business-related air travel even though I have a United Plus Card and would prefer to use that one for air travel on United. My goal was to get them to provide some of the benefits that I would have received for using the Visa card, but I was told in no uncertain terms that I’d not be eligible for those benefits if I didn’t use the card to buy the ticket.
2. Then I called Amex to talk to them about understanding the true benefits of the Platinum card and let them know about my conundrum. I was very honest with them about using the United card for personal trips based on the better benefits it offered. My goal was for them to inform me of any benefits that I may not have been aware of, and if they were not enough to cover the additional fee, I planned to simply downgrade to either gold or green.

“The discussion was interesting on two levels: First, the woman I spoke with showed a lot of ‘empathy’ and was clearly not focused on trying to convince me of the benefits of the Platinum card relative to the United Mileage Plus Visa. But also, she proactively offered to credit my account for the full annual $450 fee, giving me a full year to completely evaluate the benefits of each program. I accepted the offer, thanked her, and I saw the $450 credit to my account a couple of days later.”

So now, my friend said, he found himself in a kind of moral quandary. He was still getting all the benefits of the Platinum card, including the $200 in annual airline credit, but he wasn’t paying anything for it. And he still had the dedicated Platinum line and concierge service that also had real value, although maybe not as quantifiable.

So he wrote to Amex, thanked them for the generous offer, and enclosed a $200 check because he just didn’t feel right in accepting so much largesse.

And now for the point of this story:

Under what conditions would your customers insist on paying you back for the service you provided them, or for the good turn you did for them?

Why would a customer ever treat a vendor like a friend? Perhaps because the vendor first treated the customer like a friend?