How to Create “Tell Everybody in Town” Customer Service Experiences

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:

1. Fewer and fewer of the youngest generation are aware of some of the “how to be” social graces. From opening doors for clients, to proper greetings, or even walking with a customer to introduce them to someone else in the bank instead of pointing them in the general direction.
2. Nobody thinks creating the WOW experience is their responsibility. The executive team is too busy with big-picture things to execute. The head of retail says it’s “not my circus.” The head of the commercial—well, we don’t even need to go there—that isn’t happening. The head of marketing doesn’t quite equate it as their role—even though it’s probably more closely aligned with that position than any other. The point is, nobody’s stepping up.
3. Nobody really knows how to choreograph those “you won’t believe what they did for me at the bank today” experiences. I once heard of a bank bringing in a speaker from the “happiest place on earth.” Good stuff, I’m sure, but the speaker left after the one-and-done seminar, and the staff went back to delivering the same ho-hum experience they delivered the day before. Knowledge, without a system for behavior change, is a waste of time (and money).

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.