We understand that there is a fine line between spam and marketing. However, banks dramatically underutilize email marketing to drive business. We highlighted a case study not too long ago where a couple simple reminders can help boost deposit balances and improve profitability.
“In our bank, a customer can go meet with our CEO.” You said it a thousand times and probably heard it from other banks a thousand more. If this is your core principal around service, then it will be tough to sustain as you will find a planned obsolesces when your growth or complexity gets big enough to prevent that customer-to-CEO interaction. We used to talk about CEO access at CenterState until we got larger.
Trying to sell more loans and deposits is a different strategy than trying to add value to the customer’s life. Jim, a commercial bank customer has a company that produces high-end drum equipment. Back in 2014, Jim drew 95% of his availability in anticipation of the holiday season. In early 2015, Jim got a note from his banker that the line was being increased due to the increase in sales volume.
Happy Birthday! While statistically it is likely your birthday is today for approximately 0.376% of you (birthdays are not evenly dispersed throughout the year), we apologize to the rest for missing your special day. We endeavor to improve and hope to collect your birth date as soon as we can figure out a way to ask for your date of birth without being creepy. Our dream is to one day send you a special card or at least an email with a gift inside as when it comes to marketing, that is one of the best campaigns a bank can do.
JD Power’s 2015 US Retail Banking Satisfaction Study that was released in part several weeks ago had some interesting information that might impact the strategy and tactics for community banks. While the full report will not be out until the end of this month, we were highlighting some points for our management so we wanted to share. The overarching good news is that, in general, satisfaction with banking continues to increase and once again community banks led the way with a score of 802 compared to large banks at 786.
Over the past month, we received lots of questions about better defining what we mean when we talk customer satisfaction. Banks use predominately one or more of four key measures. If your bank prides itself on service then it should be tracking satisfaction in some fashion in order to improve. If not, you never really know that your main value proposition is any better or any worse than it was last year or is it any better than your competition.
A couple weeks ago we walked into a community bank conducting a customer persona exercise. We were impressed, but quickly noticed that not all of senior management were believers. The question arose, what is the value of a quality customer experience at a bank?
As the last day of the Western Independent Bankers wraps up, we thought we would highlight one of the other top presentations that made us think. Joe Cady, Managing Partner from CS Consulting, presented his data on “The Best Business Models in Community Banking.” Given that 90% of banks are re-evaluating their business models, according to KPMG, Joe looked at 59 banks from 2006 to 2011 that had an average ROA of 2.2x and an average ROAE of 19%. The study excluded credit card and other specialty banks.
Yesterday’s blog on how little branch hours are correlated to revenue and customer satisfaction elicited a healthy dose of responses. If branch hours nutted some bankers up, just wait for the rest of today’s post, as this might really short circuit some guarded beliefs. The picture below is from our data and research and is a heat map of some selected factors and how revenue and satisfaction are dependent on those factors.
Lots of banks try to create a customer experience that is unique. While many succeed, more fail.
