There isn’t much room for debate; our nation is still in a bit of economic hot water. Despite our unwillingness to admit it sometimes, quite a few of our problems can be traced to problems originating in the financial industry. Despite how much you may or may not want it not to be true, the Occupy Wall Street movement is only gaining momentum, and popular opinion says that another recession might be just around the corner. For those that aren’t really sure what the talk is all about, the Occupy Wall Street movement originated in New York City when a group of motivated individuals decided to take to Wall Street, protesting financial injustice. Their website gives this description:
“Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.”
Sounds pretty reasonable at first, right? Most of you reading this little opinion piece are more than likely not a part of that 1% these friendly protestors are talking about. Still, this group is creating some rather interesting potential problems within the financial industry. Public events are sprouting up on Facebook and other networking sites declaring that November 5th of this year, if you “support the cause”, you should go to your bank and withdraw all of your money. The organizers aren’t telling you to go hiding your money in mattresses; instead they are urging supporters to take their money to credit unions. The credit union is, of course, the not for profit sister to the bank, and therefore that means that credit unions aren’t the “great evil” like banks. Already the events have thousands of supporters claiming they intend to “attend” this mass re-distribution of wealth.
The truth of the matter is if these spin-off supporters of OWS realized the implications of what they were suggesting, they would realize that ultimately they would be hurting the 99% more than anyone else if they were indeed successful at a mass withdraw. Regardless of the facts, the vast majority of people do not understand economics, and furthermore, that financial institutions are actually a necessary part of any successful economy despite popular media’s message to the contrary. So the question becomes, what can YOU as an employee of a financial institution or member of a financial organization do to combat the rampant negativity that many of your customers or colleagues might be carrying into your branch with them?
Across all industries there is one thing that can truly affect public opinion about your organization, and that is the public’s actual experience with your organization. With so much negativity and mis-directed anger floating around about financial institutions in general, your only choice is to combat these opinions head on. For better or worse, there will always be a large number of customers that have to patron financial organizations. Most everyone has to have some sort of account to function in our society. What most people don’t have to do, however, is purchase new products from your organization. Do you think an unemployed customer is going to sign up a new CD, or try for a new loan when they are really only forced to you’re your organization so that they can access their unemployment money? More than likely they don’t care about your amazing low rates. Managers take to the front lines and teach your employees the value of listening to your customers. Help your tellers, CSR’s, personal bankers, and branch managers understand the importance of their role at your organization. Set a standard of nothing less than top notch service. When the pendulum swings back the other direction, and your unemployed customer gets his job back, he will remember the teller that was always friendly, and polite, and how that teller made the customer feel comfortable doing business at your organization. Loyalty is hard to come by in our fast food society, the only thing that keeps customers coming back, is good customer service.
Now we have identified a solution to our problem, how do we get there? Good customer service doesn’t grow overnight. Everyone knows that there is much more than a policy change that is needed to affect something on a grand scale. There is an old saying that goes something like, “Fish rot from the head down”. Most of us have seen this statement hold true time, and time again. The thing that most people tend to miss out on is that this little saying also allows you to focus your initiatives. If you want to affect the whole fish, you need only start with the head. Using collaboration software like an Enterprise Portal Solution from Passageways you can bring together the leaders and managers of your company easily and with little impact on daily activities. Communication is the key in implementing any new initiative in your organization. A Passageways portal can give you the ability to push out forms or create easy to access Policies and Procedures to help guide your front line staff and managers in their pursuit for better customer service. Discussion boards and other controlled social tools allow your staff to communicate with each other in a monitored environment, thus greatly reducing the amount of wasted time on sites like Facebook or Twitter. Social interaction between employees has been shown to directly influence the moral of employees which directly affects the willingness of your employees to help bring a new policy to fruition, but allowing them to interact in a controlled environment keeps control firmly in your hands. All these tools are pieces available with various Passageways Solutions and are the ideal way to help make sure you do the most you can to make your organization succeed in fighting the battle against poor customer service.
Sometimes in business… as with life, the best things to do is quit blaming everyone else for your problems and decide what you can do to solve your problem. The Occupy Wall Street movement is trying to solve their problem, what can you do to solve yours?