KQ Article

All financial institutions obsess over service, and rightfully so. Exceptional service shapes a positive banking experience, which creates loyal customers and members. Yet we often overlook the other clear beneficiaries of superior service: the people delivering it.

Every service interaction presents an opportunity to increase employee engagement. That’s why it’s critical to provide your people not only with the proper tools to assist customers and members, but the proper attitude as well. This requires helping them view service not as a linear transaction in which someone wants something that they have to deliver, but as a nuanced and mutually beneficial exchange between two human beings.

This perspective makes  service seem less like assisting a stranger and more like helping out a friend, which isn’t something people are forced to do. Rather, they want to do it because it brings them joy.

Disney often tells the story of how employees at one of its parks felt bad because they couldn’t help guests who forget where they parked in the massive lot. In response, the employees proactively developed a system in which certain sections of the lot get filled in a structured, chronological fashion. Now guests only have to know the approximate time they arrived, and employees can easily point them in the right direction. Brilliant.

This success story would not have emerged from a group of employees stuck in a transactional mindset. Such strides are only possible after detached service representatives are transformed into engaged, living and breathing customer advocates who are emotionally invested in their work.

People naturally gravitate toward things that make them feel good. When you affect a positive attitude shift toward service at your financial institution, astounding things begin to happen. Employees will be drawn to customers and members, and customers and members will be drawn to you. Everybody wins.

_{© 2012 Deluxe Enterprise Operations, Inc.}