Credibility. Critical to all, but more so to some.

How credible does a service have to be in the eyes of its customers?

It depends on what the service means to the people that use it.

Imagine you visit the ecommerce portal for one of your most-used service experiences.

The site is down.

Inconvenient. You wanted to use them today. You feel a little dissatisfied at the (lack of) an expected interaction, but not too put out by it.

Now imagine that the service business is a bank. Maybe they look after a lot of your money, maybe just a little. But your money nonetheless.

The angst grows just a little. “It’s my money. I demand access whenever / however I want it.” (Of course, forgetting weekends in college where you had to hand a withdrawal slip to a teller on Friday to get you through a weekend’s worth of social activities.)

Somewhere in the back of your mind, it occurs to you that this bank is one of the “too big to fail” banks. That for the last couple of years, it has been mentioned in the same conversations as AIG, Fanny & Freddy, and more recently, Greece.

Surely nothing is happening – of course not, it’s all insured (Note to self: review the FDIC site one of these days to see just what is insured) – but still, the thought creeps into your head, doesn’t it?


I don’t care if the company that made my toaster goes out of business. Oh sure, in the macro sense perhaps, but not in the way where I get concerned about a direct personal impact.

But service experiences with ongoing relationships carry an expectation of stability & credibility. It’s part of how customers evaluate reliability. The deeper the personal investment in the relationship, the more critical the evaluation. Because a person’s money is involved, banks are about as deep as a personal investment in a service gets.

Consumers’ brand decisions are a reflection of themselves, and particularly their ability to make good decisions. If what people see & hear about a brand strikes at its credibility, they judge it more harshly. The negative press may put them onto the attrition ledge, but it can be a small thing that sends them over.

Like a site outage. That still isn’t resolved overnight.

When customer service help is unwanted.

On Saturday mornings, before the rest of the house wakes up, I do my weekly bills. Just me, a semi-dark house, ample quiet, the first coffee of the day, no interruptions.

So I was surprised and annoyed when my bank popped a proactive customer service chat into my bill paying session with an offer of help to find the financial services solutions I need.

I don’t know what I found more bothersome – the intrusion of someone popping in on me while in the secure section of my financial management site, or that because I was in online bill pay section of the site, it would have been unlikely that they could have assisted me in my self-service. (Unless they were offering to take the gas bill off my hands for this month.)

My reaction was so viscerally negative that the options to accept the chat or close the window didn’t seem enough – I wanted a button that said, “No, and don’t ever ask again.”

I know that customer service groups engage in proactive chat to route people away from customer service lines and to drive revenue from additional service purchases. And I'm aware that my bank knows what I have in my checking account. But I view this encounter like I would my doctor asking me when I'm going to schedule a prostate exam while we're in the health club steam room – I may need the advice, but the time & place is inappropriate. I’ll ask on my own terms, thank you.

Am I overreacting here?

In a successful service encounter, the provider knows when to play their role and when to step back let the customer play theirs. In this case, I feel the provider entered into a part of the encounter where they weren’t welcome. But is this where service encounters enabled by technology are headed? Is this the new service model, and in two years I’m going to be laughing at myself for stodgily refusing someone’s help?

Related, has self-service become pervasive and have we been so well trained as customers that we now get offended when someone offers help? I can’t help but think that if someone offered to pump my gas, I might have a similar reaction.

My Pizzeria takes on My Bank

On the way home this evening, I stopped at my local pizza parlor and local bank branch. Just for fun, I pitted the attributes of the two service experiences against one another.

Guess who won?

The pizza parlor is open when I want pizza. The bank is open when I’m at work, and mostly closed I have time to go to a bank.

When I’m ordering take-out or delivery, the pizza place answers the phone, even if they have to put me on hold. The bank periodically routes calls to a “hang-up-on-me” option I’ve never selected.

In the pizza parlor, I wait amongst the aroma of baking pies. Other customers are happy to be there. At the bank I wait, either in person while listening to other customers mostly complain about heir bank service, or on the phone with an IVR response that begins, “due to unusual call volumes…” (BTW, is it unusual if it happens constantly?)

Pizza parlor has a signature dish. They make an Italian pie with a spicy jardiniere. The place down the street’s signature dish is a cheeseburger pizza, complete with onions, pickles & mustard. The point is that they intentionally differentiate along at least one line. Every bank seems to “me-too” their offerings, to the point where I wonder whether it matters where I keep my money? (Should banks be worried that we see them as as undifferentiated as “The Detroit 3”?)

I bet your bank has a www.banknameheresucks.com website devoted to disgruntled customers’ commentary. And I bet your local pizza parlor doesn’t.

The pizza place is willing to bring their offering to me, and even guarantees that they won’t waste my time. The bank?

Service recovery at the pizza place usually means a free meal. At the bank, it might not even mean an apology.

The service employees at the pizzeria are not as highly compensated as their bank counterparts, but are almost universally more service oriented.

I’m not saying that every bank should recraft their service to act like a pizza parlor. I know that what you expect from a bank is orders of magnitude more than what you expect from a pizza place.

But I do think that your average bank could learn a thing or two from how the local pizzeria approaches service. Extending outward, what would Southwest look like if they were a bank instead of an airline?

When a pizza place doesn’t deliver on their promise, we’re merciless consumers. We drive places out of business almost overnight. Yet somehow, when a bank doesn’t deliver on a promise much more important, most of us let it slide. If ever there was an industry that was ripe for a new service model to take it by storm, retail banking is it.