American Express Membership Rewards - concierge just redeemed themselves in my eyes

ok so for those of you who remember my previous post about the concierge screwing up my dinner reservations on my birthday.....

i got a call today from one of the managers at the concierge service, apologizing for their messup of my reservations and taking total responsibility for the mistake, the # was wrong in their database. She said she was sending me a $100 Amex gift card as a way of saying they were sorry. I had never filed any complaint with them about this, i had only called back after the screw up and asked what happened, and was told briefly via email by one of their reps. i hadn't demanded any restitution for it at all, so this offering was very nice of them in my opinion.

ok so for those of you who remember my previous post about the concierge screwing up my dinner reservations on my birthday.....

i got a call today from one of the managers at the concierge service, apologizing for their messup of my reservations and taking total responsibility for the mistake, the # was wrong in their database. She said she was sending me a $100 Amex gift card as a way of saying they were sorry. I had never filed any complaint with them about this, i had only called back after the screw up and asked what happened, and was told briefly via email by one of their reps. i hadn't demanded any restitution for it at all, so this offering was very nice of them in my opinion.

Very nice. Glad to hear this. Perhaps there is still hope for the art of customer service yet. Businesses will always make mistakes, but those that address the mistakes and attempt to "make it right" stand a bit taller in my eyes.

Regards

Quite nice. I've always found the concierge service to be very helpful, they always seem to have good intentions. I don't get the impression when I call that they feel bothered to be helping me.

Another positive experience I've had is with the Platinum Global Assist program. They did a tremendous job helping a friend of mine out of a jam in Thailand (he was mugged), and the person I spoke to at Amex was probably the most intelligent CSR I'd ever dealt with.

You can usually get a sense for how well a CSR will be able to help you within about 5 seconds, and this woman was way too sharp to be working in a call center. It was actually quite startling how quickly she understood and got on top of the problem. I'll have to see if I ever wrote a report about it here on FT, if not I should write one. I can only hope that my next call, if ever, to global assist lands with the same person.

Glad to hear they came through for you. Way to go Amex concierge.

yea i never complained to them or even asked for anything from them, really showed me that they care.

Could it be that someone at Amex read your post here and decided/hoped to get some positive publicity? :-)

Could it be that someone at Amex read your post here and decided/hoped to get some positive publicity? :-)

Ummm.... how exactly would someone at American Express Corporation know that the user xolinlevh on FT correlates to Amex Plat Card #X?

Highly unlikely.

Regards

Ummm.... how exactly would someone at American Express Corporation know that the user xolinlevh on FT correlates to Amex Plat Card #X?

Highly unlikely.
Agreed, especially when one considers that the concierge service is not run by AmEx; they are a contractor. It wouldn't be too hard to match up the complaint against a post here as the specific date and location of the event are noted in xolinlevh's original (and justified) rant on the topic a couple weeks ago. Any decent CRM system would be able to query for reservations/called made on that day about PF Changs in LA and come up with a limited number to choose from pretty quickly. And finding the one with the error in it would be trivial. But I doubt the posts here led to it.

cool story, most companies don't understand how customer service can impact their businesses. Glad to see AMEX does understand it.

Agreed! It's nice to hear that the Platinum Concierge made things right for you. Sorry to hear you had to deal with any inconvenience, but it is nice that the company went out of their way to formally apologize and offer you something to show that you are a valued customer.

Since we're on the subject of good customer service, though this is totally unrelated, I recently posted a message on the Apple message boards about a small glitch I was having with my new computer. It wasn't even a complaint, just more of a question to see if I was the only one, or if it was a common problem. Within an hour, I get a call from Apple customer service (they had cross-referenced my e-mail address when I registered with the forums to the registered e-mail/phone number of my laptop), saying that they're sorry for the problem, and would like to pay for me to ship my laptop back to them and send me a brand new one in exchange. I say wonderful customer service on their part ^