RETAIL DELIVERY SPECIAL REPORT PART II
5 Who Fight to Win
On the Front Lines
BY KENNETH CLINE
These top bankers say service quality is paramount to building customer relationships.
|
SYNOPSIS | Executives of U.S. Bancorp, Wachovia Corp., NetBank Inc., Popular Inc. and Great Florida Bank describe their strategies for improving both service and sales on the frontlines as a means of enhancing customer relationships. Essential to all five: Employee morale and the balancing of employee incentives between sales and service.
When five of the most prominent executives in the country take the general session stage at BAI's Retail Delivery Conference & Expo (Nov. 15-18 in Orlando), their focus - across multiple sessions - will be the customer experience. The customer experience is also the subject of BAI's new study, The Frontline Experience to be released at the conference.
Given a preview of the research, none of the five executives profiled on the following pages was surprised to learn that less than one-third of bank customers express an interest in a deep (multi-product) relationship with their primary financial institution. Benjamin P. Jenkins III, president of Wachovia Corp.’s General Bank, noted the tendency of bank customers to use multiple providers. “These results show that you don’t get a lot of help just because you do one or two things with a customer ... You still have to have the very best products, presented the very best way, to expand that relationship.”
Yet the difficulty of developing deep relationships doesn’t discourage our five profiled executives. Although each has a different strategy, they are committed to improving the customer experience their organizations deliver on the frontlines as a means of strengthening existing relationships and attracting new customers.
NetBank Inc., for example, seeks to provide in the online space a customer experience that resembles Amazon.com, where customers never talk to a human being. At the other extreme is the intensely personal, one-to-one service offered by startup Great Florida Bank, which assigns a relationship banker to each customer.
All five banks are using incentives to motivate their fontline employees to do a better job of cross-selling while seeking to strike a proper balance between sales and service. Likewise, they are concerned about improving and maintaining employee morale, convinced as they are that they key to good service is happy employees.
INTERVIEWS: 5 WHO FIGHT TO WIN 'ON THE FRONT LINES'
5 WHO FIGHT TO WIN INTRO
RICHARD C. HARTNACK
BENJAMIN P. JENKINS III
DOUGLAS K. FREEMAN
RICHARD L. CARRION
M. MEHDI GHOMESHI
Questions
or comments about this article? Post them at the Banking
Strategies blog.
|
