Executive Summary

Why High Touch Endures
Through The High Tech Explosion

Jim Campbell
Norwest Bank Minnesota

February 1996

In financial services and other industries, there's a view that the smartest tack today is cutting expenses by using technology and turning away from high-quality, solution-based customer service.

Despite the success of many low-cost providers and the challenges of delivering quality customer service in the '90s, we believe it's both profitable and socially responsible to maintain high touch service while appropriately integrating technology.

Why is delivering quality service harder today?

• A decade-plus of corporate commitments to "quality" raised customers' expectations for service. We no longer aim for customer "satisfaction," but rather "delight," "awe" and "surprise."

• Having many different delivery options makes it more challenging to find the most efficient combination. We have an obligation to our shareholders to employ staff and technology at appropriate levels that will delight both customers who primarily use only ATMs and The Phone Bank and those who demand personal contact on a regular basis. Achieving this balance depends on understanding when, where and how customers want to be served.

• In consolidating industries, it's harder to focus all pieces of the organization on customer happiness. To do so, we developed PACE--Performance Against Customer Expectations. Regularly, we convene all 30 managers who "own" a part of the process whereby we give large commercial customers financial information they need daily to make investments. Getting this information on time is our customer's top concern. In the past delays caused different departments to point fingers at others, forgetting our business objective. PACE takes people out of work "silos" to see how their actions fit into a continuous stream that ends with the customer.

• Finally, it's challenging to remain focused on quality service and not be distracted by customers interested only in price. In a company committed to high-quality, solution-based service, there's no point chasing customers who don't value what your company adds with its expertise.

There are many reasons to continue investing in high touch, solution-based service.

While no precise value can be assigned to the social service performed by Norwest employees "Going to the Nth Degree" for their customers, we often see sales directly related to efforts such as these:

• Unable to recharge the battery of a customer's wheelchair, a teller supervisor pushes the customer in his wheelchair five blocks to the customer's office.

• On a hot summer day, a teller changes a tire for a young mother and her small child.

• During off hours at her home, a banker reconciles a customer's hopelessly mixed-up check book.

Helping people one-on-one can be as beneficial to our image as profitability as other investments in community. It's another way of "doing well by doing good." We gain business by going the extra mile for customers, and there's a direct correlation between service levels and customer retention. Ninety percent of our customers who purchase eight products--eight solutions to their financial needs-- will be with us after two years, compared to only 65 percent who buy only two products. This requires highly personalized selling--somewhat like a doctor making a diagnosis--to identify as many as eight of our customers' financial needs.

Finally we're convinced employees gain deeper job satisfaction from helping people solve their problems rather than merely conducting transactions.

While responding to demands for technology, we continue to bet that our people will be most critical to our success. Enthusiastic people, eager to serve and solve problems, will help us thrive through volatile markets, product innovations and technological changes.

Center for Ethical Business Cultures

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