American Express reviews

4.1

81% would recommend to a friend

(18,612 total reviews)
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Stephen J Squeri

89% approve of CEO

79% positive business outlook

American Express has an employee rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars, based on 18,612 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The American Express employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Finance industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

19K reviews
2.0
Sep 20, 2013

Don't work here

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Compensation is comparable to the industry.

Cons

If you look at the organizational chart you will see that Indian VPs have Indian employees. You will see that Chinese have Chinese employees. If you are not Indian you may have to ask one of your Indian friends to ask an Indian team to do something. If you ask the team directly they may not reply. Some teams are great; some won't do anything unless you are Indian. It's disheartening, if you were born in the U.S. or came at an early age you won't be prepared for the tribalism. Be leery of the top ten places to work rankings. Notice that it is very often based on diversity. You have race based, gender based, country of origin based organizations in AMEX and even things like women's leadership book clubs. You will receive notifications from VPs saying they want to promote more women. Pay attention to all the comments about re-orgs. At least one a year. At first they got rid of the under-performing employees. Now it is anybody. Some teams have bottom up initiatives. You create your own opportunity. At the end of the year you get evaluated on your work. Others, though, are run by the whims of the leadership. You will chase bad idea after bad idea. Leadership will squash anything that is not originally theirs. You will become inefficient by templates, formats, MIS requirements, changing priorities, and unresponsive capabilities teams. You will spend five minutes of analysis and five days on putting together a presentation. Then months will be spent on low or negative valued alterations Driving implementation is not a priority for these types of teams. No prioritization or consideration of opportunity costs. At the end of the year you get evaluated on how lucky a guess the leadership made. If the job requires a Ph.D. and you get a rigorous technical interview don't assume that the work is engaging. You may very well find that the most engaging thing you do is addition. It can be a real bait and switch.

5.0
May 29, 2011
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

American Express is a results driven company. You are rewarded well for performing well, both monetarily and in terms of career advancement. There is a big focus on work life balance because they want happy employees. Happy employees perform better. Everyone is super nice and it is fun to go to work.

Cons

The job itself can be stressfull, your expected to make an emotional connection, solve the cardmembers problem, give them a "benefit" on every call, and do it in under 300 sec. Plus your phone availability needs to be 90%. So it is work, work, work.

1.0
Feb 7, 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

there are many virtual (work from home) positions. i honestly can't think of any thing else that is a pro, i hate this place.

Cons

horrible management, everyone passes the buck. constant stupid training calls that don't really train you and are just tooting the horns of someone in 'advisory services' or marketing. management loves to talk about how great they are. don't ever say anything that is not completely positive b/c you will be black listed. stupid development plan process. training new hires is a joke, the current employees have to do it all in between their own work, management can't do it b/c they don't have a clue.

Viewing 190 - 192 of 18,612 Reviews

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