I have an American Express business card, and got an email to take part in an online survey. I spent ten minutes or so answering questions about my satisfaction with the company. Many of the questions were related to promotional offers and other solicitations the company sends out. Fine so far.
The last page of the survey thanked me for my participation, and offered me a $15 gift card from Amazon, if I would enter my email address. I don't buy from Amazon because I don't like the way they use and resell customer information, so I tried to click past this page and complete the survey. I could not.
So I have to assume that Amex probably negotiated a deal with Amazon. "You give us some $15 gift cards that we can use to make it look like we are giving our customers something of value, and in return, we'll harvest email addresses so that you can spam our customers for the rest of their lives."
What makes this so sad and pathetic is that the survey was about the amount of unsolicited offers the company sends out, and whether or not Amex users thought it was too much (or too little, though I doubt anyone checked that box). So the "reward" for answering the question, "Do we send you too many unsolicited offers?" is to manipulate us into signing up for more spam.
The way the survey was designed, you could not complete the survey without entering an email address. So I just closed the browser window. I then went to the American Express Web site to try to find out who I could complain to, and of course, there was no way to do that. All they had was a Web form and no indication of where the inquiries go or who might read them.
This is all symptomatic of a bigger issue that we see mostly with large corporations, who have simply abandoned real customer service simply because the technology allows them to. Bean counters "prove" how much money can be saved by firing customer service reps and replacing them with voice response systems (which rarely work). They "prove" how much can be saved by eliminating all contact information from company Web sites. But it seems that few CEOs ask the converse question: "How much business are we losing by alienating our customers with lousy service?"
Why is there a steady increase in the creation of new, small businesses? In part because technology enables small businesses to compete with big businesses, and in part because big businesses do such a fine job of driving customers away by the mis-use of technology and complete disregard for customers.
But wait, there's more. I tried to call Amex to get a mailing address so I could write a letter about this, and after fighting the voice response system for a while, I got a live person--from some other country! With an accent so thick that I could barely understand them. They had to literally spell out, letter by letter, the entire address. After two or three tries on each word, I still did not have the correct address and gave up. But I was able to use what information I did have to do an online search and make corrections. My prediction: Like many other companies, Amex will eventually discover that offshoring customer support hurts the bottom line, and will bring that operation back "onshore." There is a booming new kind of job opportunity, where customer service reps work directly from their homes for these kinds of customer service operations. It's a great opportunity for workers in rural areas....if they have reliable, affordable broadband.