I spent six years working at a credit union so I've got a pretty good sense of the basics on how financial institutions are run. At least on a micro level - I don't have much experience with reverse repurchases and making loans to Brazil and Donald Trump, but then again, given their track record the banks don't seem to be very good at it either. But that's not the point.
I was in a US Bank today to get something out of my safety deposit box and my wife asked one of the loan officers/member service reps/non-tellers for a rate sheet to show CD rates. We have a CD that's getting ready to roll and we wanted to see what options they had. You would think that providing a list of deposit rates would be a fairly innocuous process. Either they have the things pre-printed or they can print you a copy right away. Not there -- it took about five minutes to get a copy, but that's not why US Bank failed today.
They failed because the loan officer gave us the sheet and said "Have a nice day" and then it was goodbye. Which was nice and polite and all, but it didn't do anything for the US Bank bottom line. Now I don't like being marketed to and I don't like sales, but I imagine that the bank's stockholders do. I'm not one of those people making tons of money writing books on how to sell things, but I don't think I'm going out on a limb here and saying they missed an opportunity today.
The person who sits in the branch and opens new accounts, etc., generally has some type of sales incentive program or commission built into their compensation. So you want to be pushing product and you want to do it in a smart way. The person who is opening an EBT account solely to get their SSI benefits probably is not going to be interested in your tiered money market rates. However, someone who is actively asking you about CD rates probably has more than just an academic motive for doing so. It's an easy sale and when you have money riding on your sales performance, you should actually make more of an effort than handing someone a piece of paper and saying goodbye.
It's not just a US Bank problem either. When my grandmother passed away in 2008, she left each of the grandkids some money that was in CDs at Wachovia. So I went to Wachovia to get my money and they gave it to me and that was it. Goodbye again. While I appreciate the promptness of service, what the Hell were they thinking?
It wasn't a huge amount of money, but is your bank really doing so well that you can let a sizable CD walk out the door and not even try to keep it? I mean, I was pretty flexible about the whole thing and if they had made me a good - a decent offer I was amenable to keeping the money there. But they didn't even try and US Bank was the (perhaps undeserving) beneficiary of their laziness.
When I canceled my AOL account back in 2002 I had to run a gamut of account reps begging me not to leave the wonderful world of dial-up. I still get e-mails from the Book of the Month Club asking me to come back. When I go to Sonic or Einstein's, the cashiers are trying to sell me extra cheddar peppers and coffee and they probably don't even have some type of incentive stake in the matter. But some entities are proactive and some are, well some are banks. And that's one of the reasons that banks fail.
No comments:
Post a Comment