whynotnow

Because the rep stuck in India is involved in decisions! If anything write or email Corporate

Happy

I have not used this function for a while. Tried to use it today to verify the new SPG card sign up bonuses due to the confusion on Existing AMEX cardholders. However I found the Compose Secured Message function does NOT come up even I chose No for the silly question whether the popped up Answer to FAQ does not answer my question. Instead, it asks me to do Live Chat.

The Live Chat took a good 15 minutes or more for the agent to answer the very basic question of exactly what sign up bonus offer attached to my card. Agent did not seem competent to begin with and when she finally seemed to find the answer, her answer was not to the point - the first answer she finally came up was, "You would get the points after $5000 spent in first 6 months." But no mention of how many points - the most and foremost important answer. Upon prompting from me, she came back in a couple minutes to say 30,000, but failed to realize the 30,000 is a total of 10,000 after 1st purchase and 20,000 after $5,000 spend. Totally incompetent.

Is the Live Chat is what we have to live with from now on? Any way to get around this and still get to compose / send a SM on AMEX site?

I could not even get around this by going to the reply function of SMs still in my inbox - when I clicked Reply, the FAQ and Live Chat went up, no way for me to compose anything.

I could not believe AMEX would replace the SM with Live Chat other than to get rid of the written documentation what SMs would have preserved. Quite a questionable motive it so seems.

mia

Yes, and I have moved your post into the separate thread discussing this sorry decision.

Happy

Thanks mia. I just returned from a lengthy trip in Europe and was not up to date for the latest development to the worse. There is no way to circumvent it as of today's experience.

A survey immediately popped up once I clicked End the Chat. I rated the experience at 5 and also 5 for the possibility to recommend AMEX to others. Then in the comment section I voiced my dissatisfaction of the service and how it is a huge waste of time for both the customer and the rep. AMEX thinks this may save cost, at the end, it would probably the other way round as it would mean more calls to the phone reps when chat could not resolve issues.

I still think AMEX's motive is to do away the documentation so can get away with accountability of what its reps said in SM.

TheDapperDon

Amex continues to be terrible. I continue to question why folks laud them so much. Backdating is the only perk they provide. I like chatting, but I want to message so I can have documentation. I'm not impressed.

troyhouse

I dont like the chatting option as well, email was much better and efficient. Email reps were more "powerful" to take decisions and then reply back, while chat representatives are completely unhelpful.

wise2u

Just another example of Amex downgrading their customer service. I am really disgusted with the last few interactions with them...all my cards are going into bottom of the safe until small business Saturday, and as each annual fee comes up they get cancelled......give us CSR's with brains and options we can use, or stay on the bottom of the credit card pile.

mrkymark

I wish NYT or WSJ would do an article about this. E-mails been the easiest way to communicate and most customer friendly. I'd like to see their executives "chat" with CSR's to get anything done.

erik123

I understand most emails end up at a service center in India - and I assume the same people dealing with those are now being moved to chat.

reclusive46

lol you guys were being fobbed off. I get the odd Indian for emails but most of the emails sign off with their name and location as Fort Lauderdale.

SusanDK

I had my first forced chat experience last week and was not happy about it, nor impressed with the result. It wasted a good 15-20 minutes of my time when I could have written an email in less than a minute and been satisfied with a 48-72 hour turnaround to get a response.

If I have something more time sensitive or complicated, I will phone.

I hope they change this and reintroduce email as an option.

CabinCaptive

Used the chat option myself a couple of times today, and I agree it's completely worthless. As has been aptly stated, it keeps the company from having a rep say something that is incorrect, and then have to back up that (documented) error with miles, points, etc.

Does anyone know of an e-mail address to which we can send inquiries if we refuse to use chat?

Is there anyway around this? Today I requested that I be given an e-mail of what the rep told me about a CC upgrade, but the rep said that wasn't possible. I'd have to call and request it!?

Ragnarok

Go back to calling.

Once management sees the call volume spikes ( and the associated cost increase ), they will figure out the chat functionality is not the right business decision and will either bring back Secured Message or improve Chat to make it like-able.

italdesign

Then come up with a solution that improves the situation but doesn't alter the service level. That's NOT what Amex did. The feedback here makes it apparent their new solution is full of incompetence and service degradation. We need to voice the dissatisfaction loudly back to Amex. I say make it well known to their social media customer service - which I have done - which is usually more effective than traditional channels.

hiltonlondon2009

I love it. I think, if implemented correctly, this will be a good feature. Netflix has not had email for a while now, just live chat. If employees are trained correctly, empowered to make decisions, there is a good escalation workflow strategy in place, this can be a home run. Lots of 'ifs', but long term this is the way to go.