Rarely do I bother filling out customer satisfaction surveys, even less commonly do I fill them out with exemplary remarks. But recently I did so for Amex, and gave them 10s across the board. Let me explain.
American Express is one of the few companies I would wholeheartedly recommend to a friend. If you don’t have a card and/or are unfamiliar with how awesome they are let me drop a few knowledge bombs on you. First of all, the obvious one, you get rewards. I currently choose mine in the form of straight up cash back (automatically credited to my account each month, awesome). Second of all anything you buy has price protection. Yup, that new Apple iPhone you bought drops $100 in price a month later (first gen did)? Well Amex has got your back. I actually got money back from them AND Apple which was an epic double win. But I’ve definitely used this feature more than once, it rules. Lastly (out of this very short list of the myriad of awesome things they provide) they protect the shit out of your account. Occasionally I’ve been inadvertently shut off, like when I buy a ton of random expensive computer crap from various vendors, but I’ll take that any day over being out $1,500 like I would have last week. I got an email from them notifying me of suspicious activity on my account. Sure enough, somebody had jacked my CC number. Imagine my embarrassment as a security professional when I realized I let this happen. Regardless of the blame, they not only didn’t charge me for this, they didn’t let the errant charge go through, so they ass who tried to use my card didn’t get paid. Another double win. And for the record, I got an email literally the day after I resolved this from a hotel I stayed at saying they were breached. I fucking hate when companies are breached, get your shit together. Anyway, I felt a lot better about myself knowing I wasn’t at fault, and appreciated the irony of the situation given it is my job to make sure this doesn’t happen to companies.
If you are using anything but American Express to make purchases, you are an idiot. End of story.
Posts Tagged ‘ftw’
American Express FTW
Thursday, August 19th, 2010Old Spice Wins the Internet
Monday, July 26th, 2010Here is a very rare example of a company doing it right when it comes to marketing. An impressive effort by Old Spice to go out and crush it for a couple of days making almost a hundred videos in response to various media personalities and bloggers around the country. Here is one example, but do some searching on YouTube and check out this article for the full details.
Marketing Win
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010Nice job to the people over at Chili’s for capitalizing on the Lebron James parody Steve Carrell did at the ESPY’s last week. This is the definition of doing it right, excellent rebuttal mirroring the Dan Gilbert rant after “The Decision.” Missed the video from the ESPY’s? Catch it below.
Goodbye AT&T
Monday, July 19th, 2010Hello Sprint.
After years of struggling to do basic things like send a text message, check my email, open a website, etc on AT&T I finally hung it up. I’d been with them since I was on Cingular and they merged, I bought the first iPhone and despite its shortcomings, loved it. But with the arrogance of Apple and their faulty new iPhone (I knew I could have gotten a bumper to solve my issues, and would have, but it was the principle of it) combined with AT&T’s massive failure of a cellular network.. I jumped ship to the EVO and haven’t looked back. No more being at sport events or concerts and having Katie’s Katana (flip phone on Sprint) be able to text and make phone calls while I’m left with a $600 paperweight cause the network is too congested. And don’t worry, she is getting an EVO as soon as they are in stock.. even though the Katana (shing!) is a bad ass phone. Pretty excited to be able to actually have service when it says I do, and for everyone that says Sprint sucks, in the last week I’ve been to middle of nowhere Maine, Boston, Northeast Ohio, Phoenix and around MA without any issues. Oh, and I pay $70 for unlimited everything. And I almost forgot, I’ll have 4G a year before any other provider throws it out there. Anyway this is all not the point of my post, I just had an awesome conversation with AT&T, breakups- they are always awkward, and wanted to write it down before I forgot how great it was.
I called in to tell them I was canceling my account, find out what my ETF was and make sure I don’t get billed anymore. The lady then asked why I was canceling. Oh man, where do I start. Told her I had an iPhone and didn’t like how Apple handled the newest iteration of the device. But the real reason was because the network was always failing me, usually when I needed it most. Constantly being unable to use any data, send texts, make phone calls, etc, even when it showed full bars. She asked, I told her. On to the excuses and canned customer service responses.
Well, there are plenty of other devices on AT&T. Thanks, all set with the Backflip. Pretty sure AT&T is still in business only cause of the iPhone, goodluck in January when Verizon gets its hands on it.
I’m not sure why it would show you had signal when you were unable to use the connection. Well, let me explain then. Basically its a result of too many users being connected to the same cell tower and AT&T not having large enough bandwidth on the backhaul to handle all the requests.
Well you could use wifi. Um, if I had wireless networks available to me 24/7 I wouldn’t need a cellular provider. That is the point of having a CELL phone. It isn’t a wifi-phone.
But AT&T has over 20,000 wireless hotspots available throughout the US. Yeah, apparently these aren’t in and around all the places I have issues and/or I didn’t have time to search for available wireless networks. Again, I want a cell phone that can access the internet without a hotspot, maybe AT&T should spend more money on their network and less on wireless hot spots to patch the problem.
There was a bit more to conversation, but I tried to be as polite as possible explaining everything but as you can see my patience was strained near the end. The last item she mentioned was the AT&T was working to improve service.. again, sounds good but I’ll believe it when I see it. She was a nice lady, just not very bright, and all I could think of was that she was the epitome of AT&T’s struggles as I spoke to her. Just doesn’t get it.
Anyway, I’d go back to AT&T in the future if they get their shit straight, or Verizon if they stop locking everything down like a totalitarian dictator and charging stupid amounts of money for everything you add to the plan.. especially if either gets LTE up and running, but for now I’m going to take my $70/mo all you can eat 4G wireless on one of the sickest phones I’ve ever seen. Yes, after 3 years with various iPhone models, including using the iPhone4, I can safely say the EVO running Android 2.1 (not even 2.2 yet!) is way, way ahead of anything the iPhone can do.
John Goes to Work, Confronts Fat Lady
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009Email from John this morning with regards to him attempting to park this morning. Fat lady steals his spot, hilarity ensues:
“This morning, I came upon a woman piling her rug rats into the car, so I pulled ahead and waited. It took a few moments, maybe 4 for her to get everything situated and start to pull out. My reverse lights were on and, as she pulled away, I started to back up. Just then, a woman pulled front first into the spot (it was on the end of the line of cars, so doing so was possible). I sat there for a minute, watching in moderate shock. This really happens? This isn’t just a funny Seinfeld episode. FML. I then backed up and rolled down my window. ‘Excuse me, I was waiting for this spot.’ Her response, ‘how am I supposed to know that? Is there a fucking (she started the swearing right off the bat!) sign with your name on it here?’ At this point, I became furious. My next line: ‘How are you supposed to know that? BECAUSE YOU HAVE 2 HUMAN EYES THAT YOU SUPPOSEDLY USE TO DRIVE AND SEE SHIT WITH! It’s unfortunate that, at your age (approx 55), you haven’t learned common courtesy or the basic rules of driving’ She then gave me the finger and told me to go fuck myself. I responded by, in a very calm voice, telling her that she was a ‘fat bitch’, which was awesome because she was, so I was just making a factual statement. I finished up by telling her that I hoped she had a ‘lovely day ma’am.’ Her mouth was a bit agape at this point and she had no response. I win. I win double because I found another spot not 20 seconds later. Awesomeeeeeee! ”
