Talking Small Business Customer Care with Andrea Gellert, VP of American Express OPEN

CustomerManagementIQ chatted with Andrea Gellert, vice president of customer experience and engagement for American Express OPEN. OPEN aims to help small business owners enhance their culture of customer care. Gellert has been with American Express for 14 years, leading the launch of card acceptance for tax payments, working on merchant relationships with several major hotel companies and determining business-growth strategies for the air, hotel and restaurant industries.Gellert discussed the OPEN initiative and her upcoming participation in this year's Customer Experience Summit in Miami.

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You'll be participating in a quick-fire case study session at the Customer Experience Summit in Miami. What interested you most about participating?

People always say that great brainstorming happens in short bursts, so this seemed like a great way to distill a topic to its essence and get robust discussion.

I understand that within a year, your marketing group at OPEN has made leaps and bounds in the customer experience arena through quantitative research. Can you tell our audience the approach you took to get there?

We have made a lot of progress. The approach we took was to operationalize our Net Promoter Score (NPS) data to be monthly at the product level, with verbatims included. This has allowed us to do far more behavioral and verbatim analysis than previously, and given us a lot more insight into our customers than before. We have also done a significant amount of quantitative research to benchmark externally, which has allowed us to get a view into what other customer-focused companies are doing that we aren't doing but could or should be.

What are OPEN's best practices when it comes to customer satisfaction and loyalty?

We understand what creates promoters and detractors, and are working both ends of the spectrum. We understand that small business owners want good value and a consistent, personalized experience across all of their touchpoints with us. We do our best to make sure we have best in class products and experiences.

What is your employee culture like? Is there any particular aspect that makes it unique?

OPEN's culture reflects our mission, which is to help small business owners do more business. Because small businesses form the backbone of the American economy, we come to work every day with a higher order objective - we're not just about selling cards, we're about doing everything we can to ensure that small businesses have what they need to be successful. I think that makes us unique, but I also think that every company has an opportunity to connect what they do to a higher purpose - it makes it motivating for employees as well as makes you evaluate your customer experience differently.