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Why Should I Do Business with You?
By xaby | October 9, 2007
A few months ago, I attended an invitation-only conference for retail bankers organized by Tom Brown, one of the most thoughtful hedge-fund managers I’ve met. It was in a cheerful setting, but the mood was somber. Most of the talk emphasized how brutally competitive the business had become. The complaints were familiar to executives in all sorts of industries: The Internet was wreaking havoc with profit margins; mergers and acquisitions were creating a handful of giants; customers had become tough, demanding, fickle.
It was enough to make me, as an outsider, feel sorry for the group—until one industry expert explained the real source of the bankers’ problems. This consultant, whose firm has conducted thousands of “mystery shops” and interviews with front-line employees at retail banks, told the gathering that during their visits, his researchers always ask bank employees a simple question: “As a customer, why should I choose your bank over the competition?” And two-thirds of the time, he said, front-line employees have no answer to that question—they simply “make something up on the fly.”
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