AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO GET IT RIGHT
Ever wondered how your team or your colleagues convey a “no” to their customers when necessary? Or how consistent this kind of communication is across different account managers? Here is a real-life example, copied and pasted from the original emails.
Background: A bank customer asked his bank to reorganise his home loans, no change to the overall amount, just shifting the various parts to accommodate evolving market conditions.
In response to this request, the client was sent a new set of Terms and Conditions to sign. These new T&Cs included a paragraph about the right of the bank to potentially disclose customer information to third parties. Our featured customer wasn’t happy with that and asked if the bank could strike out this paragraph in the document.
As chance would have it, his regular personal banker had brought in a colleague to help with an increased workload, so when the customer sent them a message regarding the updated Terms & Conditions, he got a response from both, separately.
These are the two separate responses he received:
Email from the first banker:
Hi <Name>,
Thanks for your email.
Unfortunately if you are not happy with the T&Cs as is, I will not be able to proceed with the full deal.
I am able to make changes to your loans e.g. change from variable to fixed product, however to change the amount of each loan I would need to have the T&Cs signed.
If you would like me to fix the loans at their current values I can proceed,
Let me know.
Kind regards,
<Signature>
Email from second banker:
Hi <Name>,
The privacy consent is pretty standard across the finance industry, and they would only disclose if they needed to. E.g.: if we were ordering a valuation, we would need to give your contact details to make an appointment to access the house or enter the loan to valuation ratio into the rules engine to know what type of valuation was required. For employer, if there was a question around employment, they might ring the employer and confirm that you work there and your income, but they would never disclose what sort of loan you were going for or what your financial position is. It’s not like Facebook where they are capturing everything they know about you and selling it on. It just doesn’t work that way.
If it helps, I’m really protective about my online privacy and I accept these sorts of conditions.
I understand your concerns but the bank only ever discloses what is essential to do that particular part of the process.
I hope that helps.
<Signature>
PS: I’m glad you read it. Most people just go “…where do I sign?”
There are rare cases where you actually don’t want to give the reason for a “no” to your customer. In banking sometimes it is the official policy not to explain to a customer why they decided not to lend them money. But even if this were the case, such a bank would want to make sure that all their lending staff would communicate this in a consistent manner, would comply with this policy, and avoid getting entangled in the discussion around the reasons why they said no.
And it should be a similar level of consistency in the communication above: If one rep simply tells you that if you don’t comply they won’t help you with their services, while the next one goes through the effort of providing a good explanation, and suitable analogies that help understand the abstract world of banking T&Cs a bit better, then this is a serious gap in the service excellence consistency you provide to your customer. It’s not customer centric.
Well informed customers are better customers.
But the more serious problem is that the customer, after receiving the first email immediately considered leaving this bank. This first banker clearly had no understanding of the customer’s concerns, nor did they seem to care, and didn’t give the appearance they were actually interested in the customers’ business in the first place.
Now imagine you had received the second banker’s email first. This would have created an entirely different perception. The customer felt understood, cared for. The banker clearly made an effort to explain and help the customer understand as well, and being on the same page certainly would have made the subsequent discussion much easier…
…if the first email hadn’t already left a really bad aftertaste.
Remember, everybody lives by selling something, and even that bit of information on the side needs to be sold properly.
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