American Express leverages Salesforce for real-time connectivity

Over its 160-year history American Express has prided itself on being a customer-centric company, driven by new ideas.

In its quest to maintain its customer focus in a competitive landscape characterized by startups and rapid innovation American Express set about the task of massively empowering its 62,000 employees through real-time information.

“We need to use a platform to provide information to all of our employees or we will lose.” said Greg Keeley, EVP of Global Corporate Payments.

He goes on to say, “The power for us is the information we have, the trust we have with our customers, and our employees’ ability to deliver on that.”

American Express started with Sales Cloud as a tool for the sales team in 2010. Chatter and the Salesforce 1 Mobile App now enable thousands of servicing, marketing, and product staff to communicate and collaborate in real-time to solve customers’ problems.

According to Barbara Agoglia, VP and Head of Global E2E Marketing, “The word is ‘connected’, people feel that they are one team on one single mission for our customers.”

With Salesforce, American Express is delivering rich customer experiences based on critical, real-time information:

• Before there was no way for a salesperson to know how a client was interacting with the brand or products.
• Now, using a single digital device salespeople can instantly get a clear and complete view of a customer’s history and needs
• With Salesforce running on tablet computers they can spend more time out of the office with clients

The Salesforce Customer Success Platform is helping American Express to future-proof itself:

• Consistently delivering on its core values of customer safety, trust and convenience
• Turning information into knowledge, delivered in real-time to anticipate customers’ needs and help them make key business decisions
• Providing customer experiences that exceed expectations, for example American Express products used by business travelers to manage expenses and travel details while on the road make payment and expenses claims easier, removing the need for paper
• Leveraging real-time connectivity to take its internal collaboration and customer service into the future