SunTrust puts the customer over product; Wells
Fargo does the opposite; which is better for business?
Last Thursday I listened in on Celent's Banking's
webinar, "The US Open: Account Opening Experiences at Top US
Banks," with content drawn from
Celent's report of the same name. In concept, the webinar was
far from revolutionary; Celent senior VP Bart Narter did the leg
work, literally, of visiting and applying for accounts at 12 large
banks. Sometimes straightforward comparative research is the best
thing a bank or credit union can do. (Although I hope Bart figured
out how to apply without hurting his
Qualifile score; I received my Simple invitation shortly after I
did similar comparative research for online account opening, and my
application was tragically denied.)
The banks were:
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Bank of America
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BB&T
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Chase
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Citibank
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Fifth Third
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HSBC
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PNC
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Regions
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SunTrust
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TD Bank
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US Bank
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Wells Fargo
I had a couple of high level takeaways from the webinar. For
Celent customers interested in the topic, I encourage you to watch
the recorded webinar or
download the
report from Celent's website; these points are only a small
fraction of the webinar's content, which was itself a fraction of
the report's content.
1) Customer over Product?
Customer: Bart's favorite experience was at SunTrust, who started the
process by emphasizing his needs, not their products, with a
worksheet that guided product selection with the goals "Prepare for
the Unexpected," "Plan Your Future," "Plan for Major Purchases,"
and "Manage Daily Finances." (Read more about it on the
Celent report summary page.)
Product: In contrast, Wells Fargo's aggressive
sales culture and practice of bundling products left Bart with
several accounts that "got set up magically," and a bad taste. U.S. Bank and Chase too were guilty of pushing
products a little too hard.
I found this dichotomy interesting because of an
old Forbes article I stumbled across last week that cited Wells
Fargo as the head and shoulders leader in cross-sell, with an
average of 5.9 products per customer. Bart may have liked SunTrust
better, but Wells Fargo seems to actually get better results. And,
the fact is, an average customer applying at Wells Fargo doesn't
know that customer experience is better elsewhere, and even if they
did, probably wouldn't turn around and apply again at another
institution. So my question is, while banking remains sticky is it
worth it to sacrifice product pushing for customer experience?
This
article suggests that, at least in the long term, the answer is
yes. For more thoughts on this topic, register for Andera's webinar on cross-sell with
Geezeo on March 14th
2) Room for Improvement
Of course, as an Anderoid,
my other biggest takeaway from Celent's webinar is that account
opening and loan origination in the branch is still a pretty
archaic process. Celent reported that the average time to open an
account was about 20 minutes, longer than that at Bank of America. I
was actually surprised it was so fast; opening an account at TD a few months ago took me
nearly 40 minutes. No branch used tablets, although one had
recently put in a self-service teller. The process at most
banks, particularly HSBC,
was complicated, involving temporary pins, passwords, and debit
cards and follow up phone calls that didn't always happen.
One bank's branch manager actually physically took him outside to
make his first deposit in the branch's ATM and getting signed up
for online banking was typically a very complicated process.
These processes don't sound enjoyable for customers or staff,
and definitely suggest that there is room for improvement. All in
all, the webinar was a nice confirmation of the work we're putting
into our oFlows
platform.
