Bank Transfer Day was supposedly a shot across banking's bow — a warning of customer unrest, diminished trust and fee intolerance.
But certain things don't change. Customer loyalty depends on the same things it has always depended on: good products, good channel mix, fair pricing, good technology — all wrapped in good service.
That is true if you are a much-maligned big bank trying to limit the poaching, if you are a community bank whose customers are noticing slightly better rates at the credit union, or if you are the credit union.
It's true even if all turned golden tomorrow — if the recession ends, the euro stabilizes, unemployment plummets, the deficit shrinks and layoffs end: executing your customer-centric strategy would still be your path to success.
This is not to ignore the wellspring of ill will that led to BTD, or the pricing mistakes, layoffs, bailouts and inequities that made bank-bashing popular. They are widely covered, properly lamented and naturally punished by the market.
But in the long run what BTD did was shine a bright light on two stark facts: the economic downturn has left fewer high-value customers to compete for, and it left some institutions in better condition than others to compete for them.
Each institution needs to scrutinize its ability to compete in three areas that have become crucial to competitiveness.
Fear at the front line: We know the financial crisis changed the way people regard banking. How could this not have damaged the confidence of banking's sales and service employees in engaging with unhappy customers?
The ordinary sales and service training you gave them is insufficient for today's climate. If you have not explicitly enabled them in the nonintuitive discipline of holding fruitful conversations with disgruntled customers, they will fear and avoid the customer conversation.
When they do engage, they may be defensive with unhappy customers, or not proactive, leaving customers' new needs undiscovered. They may even collude with the unhappy customers.
In this new environment, they need fresh skills training in a new set of customer objections, and fresh coaching on managing unhappy customers, converting them and expanding those relationships.
No time for sales and service: Layoffs may be necessary, but they can be hard on sales and service. We know the financial crisis changed the way people regard banking. The people left behind to pick up the workload still have to deliver excellence, often to unhappy customers, and now they have to do it with fewer people. The math says they don't have time.
But if your institution is like most, your people operate in a culture of interruptions — unscheduled meetings, customer visits/calls, emails, texts, visits from the boss, visits from employees, some of them necessary but most of them heedless and unhelpful. This culture treats time, that precious, costly, nonrenewable energy source, like the cheapest of commodities.
To succeed in carrying out your customer-centric strategy, they need to learn how to make more time — we mean that literally. They need to learn processes that create surplus time for the time-starved: time locking to ensure that top priorities get undivided attention, batch processing to pump out similar tasks in efficient manner and workday planning to facilitate a new and unfamiliar discipline.
Instead of overstressed workers responding to the interruption of the moment, they can become organized professionals, certain of their priorities, confident in communicating them, and disciplined in executing them. It is the only way that fewer people can do the work of many and do it well.
Embedded behavior: Even if you have rigorously trained your front line in the right sales and service behaviors, what almost always happens after a while? Performance eventually trails off. Old behaviors return, because nobody had a plan to embed the newly trained behaviors. The failure to embed means money got spent, people got trained, time got used, and now there's nothing to show for it except cynicism about training.
In ordinary times, this waste is costly, but these days when many institutions are shorthanded at the front line, it is intolerable. What your overworked front-line managers need are tools for embedding those behaviors.
One example might be a Perfect Hour, when every employee in the branch or call center is asked to focus on one particular behavior (a greeting, or an introduction, or a tag-on) and do it 100% correctly in 100% of interactions for the full hour.
If your institution finds itself suddenly taking on new customers, you might strive for the perfect onboarding experience. After all, if unhappy customers bring you new accounts, the onboarding session might be the last time you see them in person, and it is certainly your best opportunity to identify their cross-sell needs.
Those are just two embedding tool examples, but there are as many tools as there are embedding deficiencies, so it is critical to choose the right one for embedding the particular behaviors that will allow your institution to profit in this environment.
Edward G. Brown is president, co-chairman and co-founder of Cohen Brown Management Group Inc. in Los Angeles.
