I thought about the opportunity of capitalizing on every interaction and moving away from being a cost of doing business to being an investment in building relationships.

Jim Bush – Executive Vice President of World Service – American Express

Let’s give Jim Bush a “marketer of the day” award for his mindset on how to leverage the service function to impact the bottom line – via customer engagement and not simple transaction management.

As he declared in a recent Fortune interview:  “We let the customer determine how much time they want to engage. That engagement drives value. We serve customers, not transactions.”

Even if you don’t work in service, adopt an “outside:in” perspective and always consider what you can do to positively impact customers.  It may come as a surprise that the AMEX service team is focused on and considers what it does a company competitive advantage.

Learn more in this video clip.

Also eye-opening is the application of the net promoter concept.  Bush describes the thinking:  “For every servicing transaction, we ask, How can we get the customer to feel better about American Express and recommend it to a friend?  That’s a promoter.”

Learn more in this video clip.

And, finally, here’s a wonderful, concise management leadership tip that we can all apply every day:

“Giving our people freedom, boundary, and purpose, combined with holding them accountable, drives economic value.”

Headline

Wherever you reside in the customer touch-point and sales/marketing chain, consider yourself a value-adder and engagement builder – and then act and execute with that mindset.

Harvey Chimoff is a hands-on marketing leader and business-wide collaborator who builds marketing capabilities in B2B/B2C organizations that drive customer success.