“When was the last time you walked into a retail bank and felt a real buzz of enthusiasm coming from the workers and managers?” A great question, really, since retail and investment banks are well known to be the highest payers of graduates, and are supposedly able to attract the cream of the talent available each year.
In the UK, The Royal Bank of Scotland gets more than 10,000 applications from graduates each year for about 500 positions. Barclays gets about 5,500 jobseekers for less than 100 jobs. The same is true of other banks – and is true the world over. And banks spend a lot of money on their talent, often with dedicated HRD and talent teams.
Of course, most of the emphasis goes onto the “back room” staff – analysts, accountants, actuaries, and the like. But not much emphasis on quality front end. In fact, some banks in South Africa even outsource their tellers to a labour broker. Many banks have relocated their call centers to India (and, increasingly, Cape Town and Ireland). This is all well and good if it improves service and creates stronger connections between bank and customers. In most cases, it doesn’t.
Its all very well having a great talent management programme, but if customers don’t reap any rewards, they’re not going to be impressed.
To read more about this topic of talent in banks, see a great report in Personnel Today: Banking on high-fliers.
I think the major problems with banks (In SA, cant speak about interantional banks) is that they are bogged down with internal politics and bureaucracy. Having had first hand experience by working in one of SA’s banks for almost the past 4 years, it is amazing just how myopic they are. The most sad thing is that they try to atract the BYT’s and then bludgeon them into being corporate robots who do on command. This is not true in all areas of the banks, but in most. A comment that probably sums up the way banks feel was this one from a senior executive at the bank I worked at. A team had done a presentation to the exec board regarding innovation and how necessary it was and the growth that could be expected. The comment went as follows ” Even if we dont innovate at all, we ill still make our profit targets, so why should we spend money on innovation when we can hit and even exceed our targets.”
So sad, some people just dont get it!
We recently did a project to get to the bottom of low customer satisfaction levels at one of the big 4 SA banks. It involved collecting stories from customers and customer-facing staff about good and bad experiences they’ve had.
The results indicated that most all of the customers wanted personalised service (as in the good old days), and that a single bad experience in a branch can motivate them to terminate a relationship of several years.
Banks need to wake up to the fact that their customer-facing staff is their ‘first line of defence’, and that these people make or break the image of the bank. Back-end systems can be as good as they come, but one rude or uninformed teller can cause you to lose many profitable customers.
This doesn’t apply just to banks but to every service industry. How many times have you been ‘helped’ by a surly teller or someone who was more intent on her conversation than assisting you. Or my best yet, when they ‘follow you’ around the store even after you’ve made it clear that you would ask for assistance when you needed it and yet they insist on shadowing your every move.
So to these companies – stop spending money on expensive marketing campaigns which tell me how much you care about me and my custom, and spend some money on getting your frontline staff up to speed. That is where you should be concentrating most of your attention and budget!
A happy, satisfied customer is worth their word of mouth in gold!