Now is the time that customers and prospects demand that you are excellent at what you do. I have a friend, and a vendor to my business, who told me that because a big chunk of his income comes as a result of community banking,  he thought he should switch over his account and work with a community bank.  So, for the first time in his life, he went to a community bank and opened an account. Astonishingly, he said there was no one who could open the account until a woman, in her seventies, showed up and said she was the only person in the bank who could open the account.  He talked about how she had to write everything down on a piece of paper before she could put it into a computer because she wasn’t skilled at the computer.  And so, it took a very long period of time.

Video: Customers and Prospects Demand Excellence in Stressful Times

Think about the impression that creates.  The results that we get in terms of attracting more customers as a result of the talkable experiences and those talkable experiences better be “wows” not “un-wows”. Unfortunately, this is a time when too many banks aren’t paying near enough attention to their customer experience, making sure there is massive value added in extreme ways and that it’s visible to all.  That this is the only bank people should be coming to because of what you do and how you do it.

So let’s go back to the basics and have mastery of the core things like how we answer those phones and make sure those mystery shopping scores are just as close to a ten, on a one-to-ten scale, as can be humanly possible to make sure that the account opening experience is a wow.  And, if you’re not getting six or seven additional accounts when you’re opening up on a prospect as they come in, that tells you that the experience is not good because cross-sales is a measure of trust.  So now is the time to get into mastery of the skills if you want to be one of those banks that emerges stronger at the end of this.

– Roxanne Emmerich

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.