5 minutes
No matter how attractive, technologically advanced, functional or promising a new branch concept appears, staff is what drives success. Today’s branches must focus on engagement, relationship-building and providing the right products at the right time. This requires the right kinds of people—those who are outgoing and love to engage, with the right motivation in terms of brand passion and personal rewards. They can only be the best they can be with the right training.
As an example of needing to have the right people, consider $3.8 billion BlueShore Financial, N. Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2005. Its new branch prototype wasn’t performing after two months. Everything about the new branch prototype was on target—except that the branch manager wasn’t on board. And his lack of enthusiasm was transferred to the staff.
A few months after bringing in a manager who championed the new brand experience and investing in brand training (the CU even sent its concierges to the Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center, the branch started to grow at $1 million a month after just a few months. Today, the branch holds $385 million in deposits, growing 400 percent since 2005, with the same number of clients as it continues to grow relationships and share-of-wallet among BlueShore’s target market of mass affluent and emerging wealthy.
Success requires the right people and ongoing training. Weber Marketing Group teamed with EHS to engineer the BlueShore Financial experience. I interviewed Randy Schultz, VP/marketing, about brand training. Schultz is a co-presenter for CUES School of Strategic Marketing, slated for July 13-15 in Seattle.
Seibert: Why is brand training important to the performance of a branch?
Schultz: The brand encompasses everything you are … your essence, the promise employees live by both internally with each other and the experience they engage themselves in with the member at so many levels, including the branch. If you don’t put them through more than a hoorah brand reveal party that shows them how cool the new staff wearables are and what the new visual identity is going to look like, how will they know “who you really are as an organization?” It would be like Disney handing a new hire a Mickey Mouse costume and telling him to go out and be magical. It’s launching a ship without a rudder.
Seibert: How can brand training enhance seamless delivery of the brand experience across the omni-channel network?
Shultz: It boils down to employees knowing what the brand experience should be like—what it should look like and feel like—from the members’ point of view. For instance, you are touting your technology and have been asked to help members transition when appropriate to your online service—a mobile app, remote deposit capture, personal teller machines. The staff, without any reference to what your brand is, what promise you are making to the member, what your essence is all about could have simply heard, “Get them out of the lobby and on to our online services.” So when a member comes in to see someone and the staff member begins the transaction with the comment, “You know, you could have done that all online instead of coming in here,” the member just heard he shouldn’t have come into the branch. Brand training can help give staff the tools to handle different initiatives at so many levels successfully, because they will have learned how to listen and see things from the members’ perspective.
Seibert: Is there a difference in the type of people needed to successfully operate new branch business models today?
Schultz: We’re seeing a shift to having people staff branches who not only can, but who want to be able to do it all for the members when they call, go online, come into the branch or approach them at a soccer game or the grocery store. No more shrinking violets … only those who have a passion and an energy to do good for those around them. This new breed of employee is looking to make an impact and has the desire to learn more about the industry, how their organization works and how they impact it with their actions. They can’t stand being boxed into what we used to see commonly referred to as departmental silos. And it’s what brand training emphasizes at every level … that you have to depend upon each other to get the right outcome for everyone involved.
Seibert: What does brand training look like?
Schultz: It’s a great experience for the entire staff. It’s discovering what the staff is most interested in finding out about the organization that will help each of them be a better person in the life of the member. It goes so far beyond simply “engaging” the member, saying hello, asking them if there is anything else you can do for them.
Brand training teaches staff the relevancy of the organization in someone’s life, and how to go past engagement to involvement by listening, and suggesting solutions in people’s lives that may have absolutely nothing to do with anything financial. Done right, we’re actually stepping back and acting like we really care about these people who have entrusted their financial lives to us.
When that light comes on, you have a brand champion in your organization. It’s done through learning about what has built the brand into what it is becoming, through exercises, through team and partner role-playing. And ultimately, the training must include how to become comfortable answering that all-important question, “Why you?” without using rates, fees, products and services as part of an answer. Rates, fees and products make you blend in with your competitors, not stand out.
Seibert: How can brand training impact all credit union staff?
Schultz: If you have rebranded the right way, you’re looking at the brand in HR, IT, facilities, operations and marketing. So at the end of the day, everyone is impacting the organization because they now realize they are impacting each other’s jobs. There is a new sense of not only empowerment, but the accountability that comes as a result of that empowerment. The brand training program can give every employee a fresh view of the importance of teamwork—and the profound effect it can have on themselves as well as everyone both internally and externally who comes in contact with the organization. In a nutshell, you learn how to count on those around you.
Paul Seibert, CMC, is principal/financial and retail design, for CUES Supplier member EHS, a NELSON Company, Seattle.
Credit Union Management magazine’s web-only “Facility Solutions” column runs the third Tuesday of each month.
