Thinking About Money

As you can probably tell, I’m a big fan of cash rebate cards that have no fees. True, a 1%-3% discount on everything you buy isn’t that big a deal, but when you add in everything from groceries, to gas, to travel, it can easily add up to hundreds of dollars a year. And that’s for the negligible effort of choosing which card to use and paying on time.

So far my main two cards are a Chase card from Amazon (3% on Amazon purchases, 1% on everything else), and a Capital One Visa (2% on groceries & gas, 1% on everything else).

I also have an American Express rebate card by way of Costco, that has a strange tiered system of .25% for the first $2,000, .5% for the next $3,000, and 1.5% for everything over $5000/year. For those of you who are wondering, this card doesn’t start beating a 1% rebate card until you’ve spent $11,000. Not very exciting.

Except that Costco and American Express have sweetened the deal. They have a second card called their “True Rewards card” that not only starts at 1%, but goes to 2% for travel and 3% for eating out. That gets interesting.

So I decided to switch, which brings me to today’s story, an experience that was absolutely astonishing.

I’m one of those late night people who tends to do financial stuff at night. I don’t necessarily expect to reach knowledgeable people at 1:00am, so it was with low expectations that I called American Express to see about switching to the new card. I assumed that I would have to go through a “process” – probably get redirected to a different person or told to call the next day. I assumed there would be some transition process where they have to cancel my current account and open a new one, probably with a change in account number and a delay of a few weeks to complete the transition.

What happened blew me away.

Once going through the inevitable voice prompts I was connected quickly to a representative (one who, by the way, spoke perfect English though I suspect she was halfway around the world). She knew exactly what I was talking about and confirmed that the only difference between the two cards was the rebate plan. I asked her what was involved in switching and she said she could do it right away. She put me on hold for less than a minute and it was done. And by done I mean, no change in card number (so I don’t have to change online payments and such), and the new card would arrive in a couple of weeks. But get this – the new rebate schedule would apply to my current card immediately.

Frankly, I’m just not used to that level of customer service. Kudos to Amex on this one.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 2:45 am and is filed under Credit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.