The Universal Banker, a jack-of-all-trades financial services representative who is trained in a wide variety of tasks, has never been more relevant than now.
Transformational technology, omni-channel experiences, complex financial situations, an evolving branch, and a highly competitive customer experience landscape all add to this relevance.
When training your banking staff to be as knowledge-diversified as possible, consider the following:
Understanding Technology
Your banking staff needs to know your mobile app inside and out, and better yet, should be able to take a customer’s phone and manually show them the ropes. Increasingly, banking customers will be chatting online, calling, or coming into a branch to understand how to best utilize the technology your organization provides.
Beyond your mobile app, consider budgeting tools your organization has on-hand. Make sure your staff understands how to best utilize those tools so that your customers can have meaningful experiences with the resources you’re spending money putting into their hands. Additionally, make sure your banking staff has a way to report common pain points so that you can regularly improve online experiences.
Providing a Cohesive Experience
If you don’t already, make sure your universal banking staff has a useful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool at their disposal. In particular, when a customer comes in, your universal banking staff should be able to understand recent transaction history, their overall profile, and be able to pick up where the customer left off, even if their last touchpoint wasn’t with a human (ie an online task).
By creating a fluent experience, customers feel understood, and more importantly, feel like their time is utilized efficiently.
Complex Problem Solving and Resource Allocation
Historically, branch visits have largely been transactional – opening accounts, making deposits and conducting transfers. However, with many of these processes now available online, customers visiting branches will likely have more complex questions.
Make sure your staff is prepared. Understand some of the common requests, whether they are identifying errors that have happened online, looking for complex financial instruments to meet their business needs, issuing concerns about their online security or understanding how your financial institution intersects with any government-based entities such as the IRS.
Complex topics likely have complex answers, and you need to make sure your universal banker staff is well equipped to navigate these conversations and provide meaningful guidance to customers.
Evolving With the Branch
Most financial institutions are re-thinking their branch format, including making the environment more casual, opening up to financial consulting and providing self-serve kiosks in-branch.
With constant change, your universal banker staff needs constant training on not only new structures, but how to implement them effectively, and how those changes are intended to create a better user experience for your customers.
