Opportunities Lost

It may be old school, but it’s true … David Ogilvy said that, "Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising." 

What kind of service are customers and prospects receiving from your frontline staff?

Several times a year, we get the opportunity to conduct a secret shop analysis for clients. This is where we walk into the branches of our clients and their key competition and shop for checking accounts.

It never ceases to amaze me about the opportunities that many banks and credit unions are loosing at the point of sale.

The bottom line is that, unless you take specific steps to correct it, it is basic human instinct to take the easiest road. When a customer asks for information on a checking account, that’s exactly what most employees provide. We usually find one of the following responses:

Bad: The employee will hand-off the checking brochure with no explanation or effort.

Better: The employee will use the brochure as a crutch and literally read each and every checking option (in some cases even a second-chance option).

Best: The employee will ask questions to determine the best checking option, recommend a product based on the conversation and explain why that product is best using real benefits and, in the best cases, real-world personal examples (“I love our mobile banking, it’s so easy to use and you can deposit checks by just taking a picture with your smartphone.”)

If you want to move your team from Bad to Best follow these steps:

Teach: Your team wants to be helpful to the customer. Let your team know that simply giving the customer exactly what they are asking for is not helping them. Train that we must first understand their needs before we provide recommendations.

Tools: Most new accounts folks we talk to rely on crutches, even though they know the products. It’s human nature. Don’t fight it – give them useful crutches. Instead of talking to brochures, we provide our clients with tools that walk staff through the qualifying questions we want asked.

Personal Experience: Stress the importance of benefits over features. Rates are not benefits! Free is not a benefit! Saving money is a benefit … easy to use is a benefit … saving time is a benefit. If your team can speak from personal experience to these benefits it’s even better. Do all your employees use YOUR products?

Close: Providing information is one thing, but we need to ask for the close. Handing off your business card is not a close! 1) Ask to open the account today. 2) If the customer cannot, ask to get the process started for them, then make an appointment for them to come back. 3) Ask for the customer’s phone number so that you can follow-up (keep control of the situation – if you rely on the customer to call back, they won’t). 4) Provide your business card and tell the customer what days/hours you are usually at the office.

These tips sound basic, but after hundreds of shops from all over the country, I can assure you that very few banks or credit unions are following them. This process will differentiate you and help to drive account opening and cross sells at the branch level.

For more on lessons learned from our shop experiences, click here.

Take care,

Eric