Customer service expert Lisa Ford told attendees there are three levels of service in today’s world: rude, indifferent and exceptional.
“People want a relationship, not a transaction,” she explained. “Whether it’s a phone call, fingertips, drive-thru, face-to-face; whatever it is, we’ve got to make certain we are creating an experience that is truly memorable for that customer.”
Consumers can get banking services almost anywhere, she said, and who knows who will be offering those services next? “So we’ve got to be creating that truly unparalleled service experience; anybody can offer our product, not everybody can offer that interaction, that experience we can do.”
If credit unions want loyalty from consumers, they have to create an emotional connection. Credit unions today are serving as many as four generations at one time — all of which interact with the intuition differently — and the emotional connection will be different for each consumer. For some it might be that parents or grandparents were also members of the credit union, but “we’ve got to be so good in today’s time, because we are serving so many people that have a different mindset than what we started serving many years ago,” she said.
She offered rules for better serving members:
1) The members’ experience drives the relationship. “Today’s customer wants an experience that is personalized and customized to them,” she said. The best example of that, she added, is Starbucks, which turned an 89-cent item into a $4 item and created an experience out of it.
2) Know your customer and show them. For credit unions, she explained, that means using data, because no matter what channel the member uses, they want to feel like the person they are interacting with knows where they’ve been.
3) Add value. If a business isn’t adding value for the consumer, there’s no difference between them and anyone else, and that point all that matters to the consumer is the price. “So we’ve got to be brilliant at adding value.”
“If we’re not relevant, someone else will be,” she insisted. “That will be the game changer — that will be, in today’s language — the disruptor that takes us out of business."