Carrie Tolstedt
Senior EVP, Community Banking, Wells Fargo
One of Carrie Tolstedt's many challenges these days is making sure customers who interact with Wells Fargo have a more positive and more personalized experience. It's no small feat considering that her division, which includes 105,000 retail and business banking employees, handles more than 5 billion transactions a year, conducted in person at 6,200 branches and 12,000 ATMs, online, and via call centers and mobile devices.
But so far, so good. Customers rate their experience with Wells higher than ever before, based on first-quarter survey results. And in what might be an even better gauge of their opinion, they are giving Wells more of their business. The company's cross-sell ratio of 6.1 products per household as of February is up from 5.98 a year earlier.
Wells is also getting more of its customers to use digital channels-it had 22.5 million active online customers as of February, up 7 percent from a year earlier. But branches remain important, given that 76 percent of deposit customers still interact with a teller or banker at least once every six months. So this spring Tolstedt's team introduced a new, 1,000-square-foot "neighborhood bank" format, which is roughly a third the size of a typical branch. The thinking is that Wells can improve convenience by making itself available in more locations. Employees walk around with mobile devices to serve customers, and transactions are paperless for faster service, with receipts being sent via email-an option previously available only at ATMs.
