This series brings to you the most thought-provoking excerpts from my chat sessions with visionary personalities, as recorded for the Slingshot Living radio show. The conversations reveal valuable wisdom, playful anecdotes and useful advice on how to continuously overstep perceived boundaries for success in your business and your personal life.
Today’s segment features an excerpt from my inspirational chat with Laura Kelly, senior Vice President of Product Development at American Express.
Gabor: Businesses should think of themselves as being in the business of lifestyle or workstyle enrichment. Certainly the way people access and use their money and make and receive payments is strongly associated with all kinds of lifestyle enrichment factors—whether it’s comfort, security, practicality, empowerment, or freedom. Do you look at what AmEx provides as driving Lifestyle and Workstyle Enrichment?I invite you to listen to the entire chat with Laura here.
Laura: Absolutely. In fact I think to your point in your book on infatuation and really being able to delight a customer. At the end of the day it’s about changing the experience—in some ways making it easier and more convenient adding value to that experience in other ways, having the customer get delighted by value in ways they didn’t anticipate—and about creating opportunity for them or ability for them to do things they might not have even thought they wanted to do. There’s a lot of work going on right now in our space and in our company about making the banking relationship very portable. So from a credit perspective we’ve launched Foursquare, from a prepaid perspective and the mobile perspective there’s all sorts of opportunity for us to create not only a seamless consumer experience but also sort of an always-on consumer experience. If you think about the way we used to transact with the Internet we dialed the phone, and now it’s always a broadband and now it’s always in your pocket. So that evolution is really creating a revolutionary opportunity for American Express in terms of payments because we can be there where the consumer is and we can connect merchant opportunities with consumer opportunities and make it easy and simple and convenient for them to manage their money.
