BAI Banking Strategies included an interesting article today, which discusses the threat to banks’ traditional branch sales model as alternate banking channels decrease on the frequency of customer visits. The article explains that “between the ready availability of direct deposit, online and mobile banking, remote deposit capture and advanced function ATMs, many customers are finding that they hardly need to enter a branch at all”, and banks are therefore missing the chance to cross-sell them on other, more profitable products.
The author, David Kerstein, goes on to suggest that to combat this threat, banks should make the most of the remaining customer visits and offers suggestions to improve the branch experience.
Improving the Branch Sales Process
As customers gradually migrate from branch transactions, branch employees need to do a better job of cross-selling those that remain.
While I agree with David that you should maximize the potential of every customer visit, I would extend that notion to maximize the value of every customer touch point. Just because customer’s are shifting transaction processing to alternative channels doesn’t suggest that banks should forfeit the opportunity to cross-sell during those exchanges. As they have with branch visits and statement inserts, banks need to better capitalize on opportunities to provide timely, relevant offers to customers via online, mobile banking, ATMs and social networking. When sending a low balance or overdraft alerts to customers, why not provide them a link to information on overdraft protection, or better yet, the opportunity to enroll as a direct response to the message? If a customer search for a branch or ATM returns results over X miles away, wouldn’t that be an ideal time to introduce the customer to remote deposit capture?
As most financial institutions have now deployed some form of retail mobile banking, it is time for them to step back and develop a mobile strategy and roadmap for the next generation of mobile banking, which will allow them to optimize customer traffic to the right channels, maximize opportunities for cross selling and increase customer satisfaction. Pervasive Path has the capabilities and experience to help your organization think through these issues, either at a broad enterprise mobile strategy level, or to provide subject matter expertise on specific releases/features.
