First this, and then this, and then today, a letter arrives from AMEX: 

We are writing to let you know about a change to one of your Business Platinum Card benefits. We evaluate the benefits offered on the Business Platinum Card regularly to ensure we are delivering services that you want as a Card member, that you value, and that meet your needs. As a result of this evaluation, we have decided to discontinue the Domestic Companion Airfare Program. 

Let’s see. They evaluate the benefits regularly to ensure that they are benefits that I want… and as a result, they eliminated the benefit. From that language, I can only conclude that they determined that (the collective) I didn’t want, or “value” the benefit, and so they eliminated it. But I did want that benefit, and I valued it as part of the cost of switching to the “Business Platinum Card”, and of the exorbitant annual fee thereof. In fact, this benefit was one of the primary reasons that I signed up for the card. 

And so then I can only further conclude that AMEX is full of s**t, and that what actually happened is that they decided to eliminate that benefit because it costs them money, and they can no longer afford to offer it.

Which would be quite reasonable, if they simply said that – and, for example, reduced the annual fee. 

But they didn’t. Instead, they did a disservice to the customer, and then they tried to find a way to thank themselves for doing so! 

“My friends,” as I’ve been saying a lot lately, the Age of Truth is dead. As so thoroughly evidenced by the recent presidential campaign, there no longer seems to be any barrier to making a statement that is directly and plainly contradicted by fact, and then building upon the statement as if it was itself fact. 

What a disgrace. 

I wrote earlier with some minor complaints about our new corporate AMEX Platinum account – and today I have another one.

A vendor of ours emailed us recently to say that a charge wasn’t going through. After confirming that they had the correct info, I called American Express to see what the problem was. Turns out that we came up against an automatic balance maximum – as it turns out, a very low maximum, which is well below the volume that we run on our other corporate charge account.

What’s more than a little frustrating is that I was asked about our typical monthly charge volume by the rep when I opened the account, and I was assured that would be “fine”. Nothing about this limit we hit today, nor process around it, was mentioned at that time. Nor was anything mentioned, or additional information requested, when I added two of our staff to the account, and they began using it. I only found out about this issue when we reached the limit – a limit unknown to us – and then only by way of the fact that the card had been placed on hold, with no charges going through.

This is a classic example of an opportunity for customer service that turned into a customer disservice event. Instead of advising me proactively of the underwriting process while I was opening the account, I found out retroactively by way of an already frustrating situation, and now I have a card that is essentially useless to me and my staff until we comply with AMEX’s request for 2 years prior financials. In the meantime, AMEX is counting me as a “customer” and is enjoying the float on our annual fees and payments – fees which, of course, we pay up front, so as to enjoy all the highly-touted benefits of their highest-level Platinum service. 

Needless to say, I fully understand – and support – the need to properly underwrite the credit risk of their clients, especially in the current credit market. What I do not support is the practice of applying policies retroactively to clients that were established without disclosing those policies. Again, at the time we established the account, this issue of credit limit was covered, and the underwriting policy was not mentioned. Had I known then I would have happily provided the information required, prior to making use of the card.

I can only assume that their risk/reward calculations resulted in the conclusion that it’s better to put off the detailed underwriting in favor of getting more accounts open, given the barrier that the paperwork presents to potential account holders. This is a false economy, and yet another expression of the well-known software developer’s maxim: “a bug fixed before release costs ten times less than a bug after release.” In this case, AMEX won’t lose my business (yet), but they’ve gotten off to a very poor start. If their goal is to create new corporate clients and then waste their time when they attempt to actually make use of the “corporate” service as promised, they are succeeding.

AMEX, I feel ripped off.

Eh. So, I get this new AMEX Platinum business card. “Very impressive card, sir,” says the woman in the AMEX call center in Chennai as she activates my card. Yeah, thanks. In the end it’s just plastic. 

And, get this. It seems that AMEX can only handle one single authorized shipping address per card number. With my VISA business card, I do have to have them put any new shipping address on file, but I can have any number of shipping addresses on file at a time… With the AMEX, I can only have one shipping address. One. Are they insane? The solution they offered was to call them, and change it, whenever I needed to ship something to another address. Are they insane? Have they never heard of a business with more than one address? 

Are they insane? Does my fancy new AMEX Business Platinum card suck a**? 

Right now, it does.