Last Tuesday, May 19th I wrote about a bad experience I had with American Express customer service that resulted in having my card cancelled after 27 years. If you missed it you can read it here. Last Friday, May 22th, 3 days after my post, I got a call from Ms. McGovern from the Executive Offices of American Express.  She explained to me that members of American Express’s Marketing Department monitor Blogs and other social media products for mentions of the “American Express” brand.  My blog entry caught their eye, so they forwarded my blog posting to the American...

American Express, once known for offering exceptional customer support, gets a failing grade in handling a simple, human mistake. Here are the details: I own several small online businesses. Our VeriSign online merchant gateway was purchased by PayPal, so PayPal recently informed us that we needed to switch over using their API on our web sites. Last week our programmers finished rewriting EventMingle to use the new PayPal Gateway API. Credit card companies give us test credit card numbers to use when testing the gateway to make sure it works correctly. They test to make sure it rejects invalid credit cards,...