What comes to mind when you think of credit union or bank consumer experience training? A smile? Short wait times? People who understand the systems they’re using?
Those things are necessary elements of service, it’s true. They are the baseline – the first level of service. Without understanding basic operations and manners, you can’t have good service. But there’s also more to service than being nice and understanding your systems. Service has a second, less straightforward layer related to complex interpersonal skills and how you tie your experience to your brand.
You need the first level of service…but you must also move beyond it. Let’s look at both levels of service and why you can’t stop at stage one.
Service Level One: The “Hard Skills” and Basic Manners
Your service experience needs a baseline. Tellers need to know how to perform transactions. Staff members need to know how to use your core systems quickly and effectively. The team needs to treat both each other and consumers with common decency.
That’s right…there are no awards for smiles and handshakes. Common courtesy does not equate to over-the-moon service (but it is still necessary to get there). You can and should train your team on these things, but they won’t make you unique. They merely get you a seat at the very, very large table that is the marketplace.
Plus, the moniker of “hard skills” for some of the more technical abilities is misleading. It makes these baseline functions sound more important than “soft skills,” when that’s not necessarily the case. They are “hard” because they are actually easier to define and quantify.
Service Level Two: The “Soft Skills” and Branded Service
After mastering Service Level One, you need to further enhance your experience. This requires training your team on those less tangible interpersonal skills. It also means branding your service program so you aren’t just like everyone else in the industry.
The poorly named “soft skills” are some of the most important for your staff to have. These skills include (but aren’t limited to):
- How to deal with angry consumers
- How to create powerful, memorable moments
- How to cross-sell without being sleazy
- How to follow up with a consumer
Each of these subjects has nuance, and they aren’t automatically intuitive. Without building your team’s repertoire of “soft skills,” complex service situations might confound them.
You also need a unique, branded program – something special to your organization. What are the values you and only you live by? How can you show those values via your service? And do those extend to both your team and your consumers?
At a recent consumer experience training, our facilitator received a positive (and anonymous) note with a small chocolate bar and the line “chocolate helps everything.” Someone had been distributing these notes to different staff members in need for some time, uplifting many people in the organization. Imagine the resulting impact on people’s attitudes and morale in front of consumers. That’s a special display of institutional values.
Master the Second Level
Let’s be honest: you probably already mastered Service Level One. Many organizations have. But Service Level Two is where it gets difficult…and it’s also where we can help. From guiding you to create a custom journey map to consistently training your people on those soft skills, On The Mark Strategies is here to enhance your credit union and bank consumer experience training. Book a free consultation now.
