This is the story of how a regional bank is, in my opinion, wasting a ton of money on marketing and advertising because they set expectations they can’t meet. There is a disconnect between what advertising promises, what the bank employees understand, existing bank policies and procedures and the expectations of the customer.
In this case the bank’s two promises are “Free Checking” and a promotion that pays the customer to open a new account. I opened two new accounts with this bank, a personal account and a business account. Life was good.
Immediately there was a problem. I deposited money in the business account, wrote a check from the business account to the personal account then wrote a check from the personal account. Because the monies had not been in each of the two accounts long enough a fee for each transaction was charged against each account.
The fees were small but now, to me the customer, this was NOT “Free Checking”. To make matters worse had the teller understood my expectations and bank policies they could have warned me of the fees and I would have waited a day to write the checks and advertising’s promise of “Free Checking” would have remained intact.
The story continues. At the time I opened the accounts I accepted the bank’s offer to provide me with free checks. The checks for the business account never arrived. I called my personal banker and being a good customer service person he said he would take care of it. All that I asked was that the business checks not be the same color as the personal checks so that I could easily identify which checks belonged to which account. Sure enough the checks arrived the next day overnight delivery!
The checks I received were the same color as those from my personal account. And monies were deducted from my account for the “free” checks AND the overnight delivery. Now I feel like my “Free Checking” is getting pretty expensive and that I’m not being listened to. To my personal banker’s credit he noticed the mistake and credited my account. I now like my banker again but still have checks the same color.
After a half dozen weeks I’m starting to wonder when I will get the money from the bank for opening these accounts. I ask the banker and he tells me it takes up to 90 days for the money to be deposited into my account, a fact that was never mentioned during the sign up process. To me 90 days isn’t an unreasonable amount of time but I would have rather known that up front.
After 90 days and about a week still no deposits for opening the accounts. I call my banker. He explains that because I opened the account shortly after the start of the month it would be the middle of the next month before I would get paid. Now the payment for opening the account is starting to sound like a promise that might not be kept by the bank. After another month I call my banker, again, and explain still no payment. Now I’m confident I’m not going to get paid and I have nothing good to say about my bank.
Again my personal banker comes through and gets the monies into my accounts. Disaster is averted. However at this point I am no huge fan of this bank and if anyone asks I’m not encouraging anyone to switch. A lot of marketing and advertising money was spent to win me over only to lose me during execution.
The bank employees are nice, hard working and by most measures very competent. I have to believe the bank’s marketing promises and their costs were well thought through, they had a good plan. It seems to me what was missed here is the bank asking what expectations they would be setting for their new customers and how they would then meet or exceed those expectations. My guess is if someone at the bank had worked through the entire new customer process the short comings I experienced would have been obvious and could have, for the large part, been avoided.
Your take away from this is to go put yourself in your customer’s shoes and look at your business from their eyes. Walk in the customer entrance of your building and check it out. Log into the customer web site and see what that’s like for them. Go through the process of opening a new account. How did that go? Ask your employees if they know what your specials or promotions are and why they’re special. Make sure they understand what the promotion is trying to accomplish and why that’s important. If you do this you might discover all kinds of improvements you can make at little or no costs. Please, before you waste a million dollars on advertising make sure you know what your customers will expect and how you will fulfill those expectations!
Great points, definitely have the curious side of me intrigued.