Overview

Unlike traditional cross-selling approaches, ServicePlus+ capitalizes on the fact that both bank employee and customer want to be in a service relationship rather than a selling interaction. It revolves around a promis e of proactive service to the client in return for a higher share of the client's banking business. It enables the client to delegate a substantial portion of their banking affairs to their credit union once they have gained confidence that the credit union is capable of fulfilling the promise.

The system consists of a complete sales process in a box. The letters of offer to the clients are carefully composed to present the promise, and the whole process is automated to ensure that the promise is fulfilled at every step along the way.

The system expands on the concept of a Customer Information File and collects all the information relevant to the clients' preferences for banking products as well as their personal priorities and preferences. An expert system uses this wealth of infor mation to create a complete set of recommendations to the client. Future sales events, such as the transfer of a mortgage when it becomes open with a competitor, are all managed by the system to be fail-safe.

The technology is totally hidden from the client, ensuring that the personal touch is maintained. The data is collected in a personal interview with the client. The recommendations are presented by your proactive service staff, not by the computer. All client interactions are by appointment in the branch, enabling the management to balance workload and maximize client convenience.

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Implementation Approach

We would pilot the system to validate the yield rates with your clients to substantiate the business case. The guaranteed yield rates for a bank are five products per customer. We would need to validate the equivalent rates for th e specific organization to account for differences in geography, coverage, product set, competition, etc. Then during implementation, we would migrate the system to inter-operate with any existing technology.

Many Financial Services organizations have had the experience with more traditional approaches and are now ready to look at innovative ways to assure their success against the onslaught of new competitors. This initiative could be just the strategic we apon that your organization needs to fend off their attacks.

Why is This Approach Different?

Most sales assistance systems focus on trying to sell the customer another product during an interaction with them. This interaction is normally the fulfilment of a banking service and a sales approach at that time is often resented or simply ignored b y the customer. Banks throughout the world have been trying this approach for over a decade now. The best results have been obtained after several years when the sales culture has finally become ingrained. Even then, averages of over two products per cust omer have been rare.

There are at least two reasons why these cross-selling techniques are not successful. First, the client perceives their financial institution as a service organization, and the attempts by banks to turn services into products has cond itioned customers to shop around when buying new p products. There is little differentiation among various competing institutions on the service side and this causes customers to deal for a combination of convenience and value for the price.
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Secondly, the staff of the average branch have been attracted to the organization because of its service delivery role. They like to serve and respond to customers. Making them into aggressive sales people is difficult and can introduce problems in man aging two separate cultures in the same branch.

Reinforce Traditional Service Role

The approach we are taking simply reinforces the service role that the staff want to play anyway. It asks them to approach existing clients and investigate how they can make the client's life easier by providing one-stop shopping for a broader set of b anking services. This is not only consistent with the culture, but is also in line with what the client expects from their financial institution. Combining the broader business relationship with some sharing of the cost savings with the client gives them the best of both worlds.

But the clients don't enter into this broader relationship for this better value but for the promise of better service. It is paramount that the branch delivers on the promise of this better service. This is where the computer system plays a pivotal ro le. It manages the work flow and it presents the promise of better service in consistent wording to ensure that the branch staff are able to deliver a consistent service to the promise without fail.

This offer is not for every client. Only certain clients will enter into such an expanded relationship. But those clients will present such an overwhelming business case to the branch that the implementation of the proactive service relationship starts to pay for itself in less than a year. Companion tools in the platform automation systems will enable the more traditional cross-selling to be performed for the customers that choose to continue to buy their services on a commodity basis.

Summary

The ServicePlus+ system is a reengineered business process designed and proven to deliver a promise of service and to make its delivery fail-safe. Customers get consistent service levels regardless of staff training and turnover. The system ensu res follow-up and provides consistency of customer information. It gives the branch staff the confidence to ask for business to be fulfilled in the future, knowing that the branch will meet the committed future dates no matter who is assigned to the clien t at the time. The built-in expert system brings the best decision-making knowledge from the banks' own staff to the fingertips of the frontline personnel. It enables them to adequately prepare for scheduled client interactions so that they can play the role of an expert without resorting to the computer when they interact with the clients.

Copyright the authors and/or Keith Cowan