4 No-Fail Strategies to Up Your Customer Service Game from Good to “WOW”

I believe everyone loves to be well-taken care of.

In this episode, I’ll show you how to take a good service culture over the moon—to have a service culture that is so remarkable that everyone is talking about you and sending their friends.

If you’re the kind of leader:

• Who feels you already nail this customer service aspect, you’ll love this because I’ll show you how banks who have already done the Disney training or do internal service training have doubled their service scores in just six weeks.

• If, however, you have good service but don’t absolutely know that it is consistent in every location and for every customer, you’ll enjoy finding out that it really is possible to have consistency so that you can sleep at night.

• If instead, like one Chairman of the Board who called me the other day, you feel like your service has some embarrassing situations where the service is downright awful in a few areas of your bank, then your lucky day has arrived because a fast solution is possible and sustainable.

Banks seem to have the same challenges to keeping a “so good everybody is talking about you and sending more people” service culture.

First, while executives tell their community they have “great service”—there are those in the community that takes exception to that and the executives don’t even know what they don’t know.

Another is that as new people come in, the service culture standards are not implemented as consistently.

Also, one bank told me recently that they tried both external and internal training, and both became a “this too shall pass” experience.

It seems like almost every bank has at least one of these service challenges.

Now, I’m going to give you a four-step approach that will make your results dramatically different in a few weeks, so you can sleep at night knowing that your brand is not being destroyed and big deals are not being lost.

Step 1: Stop the “we’ll try this and see if this works” approaches—they don’t work. Don’t even think about bringing in a service training firm or hiring a trainer as a solution. “That changes our service remarkably and sustainably,” said no banker, ever!

Step 2: Create a plan to do a massive rollout that is emotional, applies organizational development principles and has a tremendous amount of processes designed to KEEP the score up once you move it up.

Step 3: When you roll out the phone standards, make sure the right systems are in place to move the scores from 3.5 (the average BankShop® score, the largest database of mystery shopping for banking as it applies to developing business) to over 9.4 within six weeks. If you can’t legitimately KNOW that you can up your score that fast and have zero chance of missing it, don’t do a rollout. Every weak rollout is simply another opportunity for you to affirm a “this too shall pass” culture, making future and more complex initiatives even harder.

Step 4: Once the first plate is up in the air, it’s time to roll out the other moment of truth with the same process and move those from three’s to 9.5s. Most important, it is key to keep those scores up once they move up, or you will exhaust yourself with “redos,” and your service will never make it to the “remarkable” level that actually attracts the best of the best clientele.

Let’s repeat those four steps for clarity:

• Don’t make the tragic mistake of thinking training alone can get this done.
• Plan a massive roll out—but don’t even start unless you KNOW there is zero chance of failure.
• Apply a system to reinforce the mystery shopping such that you pop that score from 3.5 on average to over 9.45 (typical of our clients).
• Roll out your other moments of truth with the systems to not only move the needles BUT to keep them up between shops.

If you are a qualifying bank, BankShop will provide you some free shops to see how you compare to their 25-year database of community banks. Click on the (     ) to start your shopping process.

Make sure you tune in next time where I’ll show you how to transform your culture scores—arguably the most important metric in your bank.