“We handle many millions of phone calls, and we have machine learning in the background, which gives every single call feedback to the customer care professionals who handle those calls,” he says. “It enables us to give targeted feedback to our colleague base to say this is how the card member felt in that call, because it can measure empathy and really help us understand how we construct our value and product proposition.”
While both projects have yielded beneficial results, an important first step was to get employees on board, Devane says. American Express has run employee focus groups to talk about its investment in automation technologies, and the company encourages its customer support agents to experiment with AI, he adds.
“I’ve always had the same idea — bring people on board the journey versus expect them to arrive at a destination,” he says. “We have to earn the right to win hearts and minds of both our customers and our colleagues, and our colleagues are essential in driving, my opinion, the best service in the world.”
