Bank call centers often squander valuable cross-sell opportunities by alienating customers with long wait times, tedious automated voice-response systems, and uninformed representatives, industry insiders said.
Jeannie Fichtel, the senior vice president of 24-hour banking and financial sales at U.S. Bancorp of Minneapolis, said the value of talking with a customer on the phone is that “you can hear what kind of day they are having and you can hear what kind of particular situation just begs for one of the additional products and services that we have.”
By taking care of an issue when the caller is most engaged and attentive, Ms. Fichtel said, her call center representatives have a good chance to offer things like overdraft protection and savings accounts.
“It’s so much more empowering — they have the problem and I can give them the solution,” she said, though some calls do not merit cross-sale attempts.
A study to be released today by the St. Louis marketing services company Maritz Inc. found that customers who have a positive experience with their bank’s call center are about 50% more likely to listen to a sales pitch for additional products or services.
“The key takeaway is that banks are potentially missing a very large sales opportunity” that becomes available “if you do a good job and earn the right to sell,” said Thad Peterson, the head of Maritz’s financial services division.
However, he said, customer service representatives have to know the bank’s products in and out, and they must have the flexibility to offer waivers and other incentives to customers who may be irked by the institution — something banks are lately cutting back on in order to trim costs.
“You can’t just say, Would you like fries with that?” Mr. Peterson said. “You have to have people who are smart enough” to cross-sell products that are appropriate to consumers’ needs. That could mean offering an additional debit card to a customer who mentions having college-age children, or overdraft protection to someone who called because they bounced a check, he said.
Maritz’s research has found that even customers in distress are willing to listen and accept sales offers as long as their other needs are met. Aggressive cross-selling “doesn’t seem to be a big issue,” Mr. Peterson said, “as long as customers are satisfied.”
In the survey of more than 1,000 consumers, conducted a few weeks ago, only a third said they had been asked about getting an additional product or service when they called their bank. But almost three-quarters of those who were pitched said they listened.
Mr. Peterson said a critical gauge often overlooked by banks is how often a customer’s problem is resolved on the first call. In the past, he and Ms. Fichtel said, some banks tried to conserve their call center resources by forwarding callers to voice mail or by asking them to call back at a different time. But resolving a customer’s query on the first call ultimately saves money, Mr. Peterson said. “At the end of the day, this is the highest economic benefit, because they won’t be calling back for someone else.”
He listed Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp., U.S. Bancorp., and USAA Federal Savings Bank as examples of banks with good call center practices.
USAA, he noted, gives customers the option of speaking to a human at the beginning of a call; B of A has a “warm handoff,” meaning that customers who are transferred from one representative to another do not need to repeat the information they gave the first rep.
