Your Plan Won’t Save You in a Merger—But This Will
Your plan won’t save you. A strategic planning system designed for high-stakes execution will. Here’s how top community banks avoid merger collapse.
I believe people love to have positive attention lavished on them.
In this episode, I’m going to show you how to take your already good customer experience and turn it into an experience your customers can’t help but talk about.
If you’re the kind of leader who is frustrated by the lack of consistently “over-the-top” customer service in your bank—where most of your customer encounters are fairly good, but not all of them—and you’re not hearing “wows” pouring in daily, then you’re going to love discovering how you can transform it quickly and permanently.
IF you are thrilled by your service culture already, you’ll love this because we’ll explore the next level—there’s ALWAYS a next level.
And if you’re the kind of leader who is exasperated when your people miss deadlines, don’t “wow” the rate shopper into a buyer on the phone, or fail to notice the little things that you know customers see, you’ll love finding a path to consistent WOW service.
There are a few brick walls in the way of creating “knock ‘em alive” customer service:
EVERY bank has this problem, and, as a result, their people have “parts disease”—customers are coming in looking at hair parts because everyone’s looking down at their desks, instead of laser-focused on the only people in the bank that matter—the customers.
I’m now going to give you three steps that will make your results dramatically better in a few weeks.
Step 1: You Can’t Teach a Banker to Wow a Customer at a Seminar
UNLIKE so many “customer service transformation attempts” that involve training and maybe a little mystery shopping to follow, you need to do it right the first time. You need ongoing training (growth), that’s tied to ongoing measurement (accountability), and ongoing celebration (reinforcement), that’s designed and proven to create behavior change that leads to results.
If you don’t do all three parts, you’ll never create permanent change.
Step 2: Focus on Rapid Needle Movement
Most of the time, when banks attempt to improve customer service, the stuff they’re trying to improve isn’t really valuable to customers. GREAT customer service isn’t just about how you answer the phones and how you greet customers in the branch. It’s all about how you dig into every customer’s situation to understand how you can bring wildly more value to them.
When you elevate the customer service game to that level, you’ll see an instant improvement in sales, referrals, and profit.
Step 3: Make the Improvements Stick
As opposed to the “let’s bring in a training company—that will do it” approach or even the “let’s hire a trainer to do this” approach. Customer service rollouts and the systems, coaching, measurements, celebrations, and visibility needs to be an “all-out effort” where a team who knows exactly what to do is aligned with the strategies of your executive team.
Three things—blended learning must have 1) a measurement system combined with 2) the coaching and celebration that truly moves the needle with 3) blow-away progress that is immediate. Follow that with a sustain-and-advance process so you don’t ever hear those ugly little words that KILL your profits—“this too shall pass.”
By doing this, you get the satisfaction of knowing you don’t have “good” customer service—you have “talk about it all over town” service that grows your bank and grows your community’s pride in you.
Don’t miss the next episode, where I’ll show you the three biggest marketing mistakes that cost banks millions.
Your plan won’t save you. A strategic planning system designed for high-stakes execution will. Here’s how top community banks avoid merger collapse.
Most banks pretend that culture can be delegated. Wrong. Elite banks weaponize culture as their profit engine. Here’s the system CEOs can’t ignore.
Roxanne Emmerich exposes the toxic lie behind most strategic plans—and the second-order thinking top banks use to pull away from the pack.
Your boardroom may be your biggest blind spot. Discover how elite banks fix strategy at the Breakthrough Banking Blueprint™ Bootcamp.
Most boards are left out of execution—and it’s destroying performance. Here’s how top 5% banks fix it.
Forget templates. Roxanne Emmerich reveals how top banks burn the rulebook and build execution systems that deliver relentless results.
Hope doesn’t scale. Systems do. Find out how elite banks drive results with engineered behaviors and real-time accountability.
Roxanne Emmerich reveals how top 5% banks grow $100M+ in core deposits and triple cross-sales—without matching rates or chasing gimmicks.
Cross-selling isn’t a script—it’s a system. Discover how top-performing banks engineer daily discipline that triples products per customer and locks in loyalty.
One bank ditched fake smiles and vague reviews—and doubled profits in 12 months. Here’s how they built a culture that actually works.