Sterling Miller

Have you seen this? Social Media Revolution

I attended a small business workshop last week on using social media to attract more business, sponsored by one of my clients, who hosted this session for local businesses in hopes of making contacts for more business. Whew! Anyway, it worked.

The reason I’m writing about is that for financial institutions, the potential for attracting business from consumers, retaining more business, and increasing sales through social media is a relatively untapped market. For me and most of my colleagues, who are my age, 55, or older, the social media revolution has bypassed us, since most of us do not spend enough time using it – some not at all. We all use email, but that it about the extent of our participation in electronic communications. 

The younger generation uses social media as their primary method of communication. They were raised on it and know all about it. They live it, they respond to it. 

One of my clients is in the process of launching a totally on line financial institution, like ING, but local - there are no branches to visit once you open your account, so marketing via the internet to attract and keep business is critical. It is growing slowly through direct mail – Google Adwords was not effective. Recently, through an e-marketing & communications consultant, they learned about the potential of marketing through Facebook and they are in the process of putting a strategy in place to target the tens of thousands of Facebook users in their market area.

I will keep you posted on their progress. In the meantime, feel free to contact me for our e-marketing & communications resource. She currently manages all e-communications for a college and is one of those young, energetic and knowledgeable people that everyone turns to for advice on this topic.

Too often in the banking business, we focus on sales instead of relationships. We get hung up on our numbers, and not our service quality. We make things easy operationally, without regard for how it effects our customers. And we want more sales and better retention.

The trick to more sales is closer relationships with our customers and better service, the type of service that people tell others about. People travel far and stay long for exceptional service because that is what they care about the most. Customers that are made to feel special every time they enter the branch or call on the phone will rarely leave for a better rate or the latest checking account offer, and they will open more accounts.

Here is a checklist of how to make your customes feel so special that they will never leave:

• Greet them with a smile.
• Use their name.
• Talk about them, be interested in what they have to say.
• Treat complaints as lessons in how to provide better service; complaints are valuable!
• Listen for clues as to what products and services they would benefit from, and educate the customer about them.
• Take care of their business, and especially their problems quickly, efficiently, with no “red tape”, whether it’s over the phone or face-to-face. This involves your operations department.
• At every interaction, find ways to be exceptional, to differentiate yourself from the competition.
• Always close with a “Thank you, have a great day!” and mean it.

Two clients are using Fans for Life (TM) and are in the training and shopping stages of the program. The greatest struggle, believe it or not, is acknowledging and greeting members/customers, and making referrals for other products and services. Neither client has begun shopping the back room yet.

Why the struggle with acknowledging the people that mean the most to these organizations, and recommending appropriate products and services? Mostly because they were not originally hired as “sales associates” but as “tellers” or clerks. Traditionally the job requirements for tellers have required little more than the ability to process transactions accurately. As a teller, you could easily hide behind your window, remain smile-less, and speak as little as possible as long as you proved your work at the end of the day. “Personality” was not considered.

Current hiring practices should involve more than accuracy. Tellers should be renamed ”sales asscociates” or just “associates” to reflect their new role, and the requirements for the job should focus on personality, sales ability and sales experience. Handling work accurately can be easily trained with the newest transaction processing technology, but a bright, friendly and outgoing personality and a willingness to sell is a challenge to train.

This concept will hold true for the “back room” positions as well. The employees that have any contact at all with members/customers, should have great telephone personalities, and sales training. Many sales opportunities are lost by not having the right people on the phone, and existing business is lost because of less-than-professional experiences on the phone.

What to do if you know you don’t have exactly the right people in key positions right now? Create new job titles and new job requirements that reflect their new roles, educate and train. Give everyone a chance to adjust to their new job descriptions, shop, monitor, reward, and hold them accountable.

Having the right people for all member/customer contact positions in this economy is paramount to running a successful organization that will stand the test of time.

This really happened to me:

Yesterday morning I got a phone call from the bank that has had my business account for over fifteen years. It was “Linda” and she said that our account had a negative balance and there were two items being presented. She was unfriendly to say the least and said I had until 1 pm at the latest to straighten it out.

That account is closely managed so I knew something was wrong, but it is always possible that I made an error, so I ran to the bank to make a deposit, asked if Linda was there and to let her know (turned out Linda was the drive up teller), and asked for a printout so I could see what happened since the account was recently balanced.  The teller just kept her head down the entire time, obviously trying her best to avoid confrontation with me. I remained cheerful. 

There were people waiting behind me who heard the whole conversation.

Once back to the office I checked the printout which showed a deposit made on Sep 9 for $.02 instead of the correct amount of $500, and $60 in overdraft fees. We were able to get a copy of the front and back of the check and I took it in to the branch this morning.  I again had to approach the teller line because there was no one on the platform again (there was a woman in an office on a personal phone call, presumably the branch manager).  This time I had to endure “Patty”, who also treated me like a derelict and made a face when I explained the problem, again with a line behind me. She left her station to check on it, and finally came back to ask if she could research it and call me back. I told her that I made the deposit good yesterday, I only wanted the overdraft fees reversed. She said she’d check it out and call me and I said “Thank you, have a great day.”

She did call later on and finally apologized for the error. But, it’s too late. I’m in the process of taking my account someplace else, because even though I realize that everyone makes mistakes, it’s how they handled it that counts. Every customer must be made to feel appreciated and important even when there is an overdraft situation, or some other error, and it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. The bank should always give the benefit of doubt and apologize up front – it just makes the customer feel better. This approach does not alienate the customer, and gives the bank the opportunity to shine brightly and create a Fan for Life! And to have this kind of situation going on within hearing distance of other customers is just unacceptable. It was embarrassing. What is this bank thinking????

No customer hugging going on here, and it’s too bad, because this is one of the few independent community banks existing in our marketplace.