Pub. 4 2015 Issue 5

l e a d i n g a d v o c a t e f o r t h e b a n k i n g i n d u s t r y i n k a n s a s 22 WHAT SOCKS TAUGHT ME ABOUT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE By Andy Elliott R ecently, I was browsing Facebook and saw a post that caught my eye. It was a photo of a small wooden board. There were clothes pins attached and a painted heading that read: “Sole Mates.” The idea is to hang this board in your laundry room, and whenever you find a single sock, pin it to the board in hopes the missing sock will show up and find its “mate.” Several people liked the post, commenting on how clever and useful the board is. I, on the other hand, was immediately struck by its futility. In the business world, you would never want to put a process in place to address the result of a regular and recurring problem–instead of fixing it. But how often do we take the proactive approach? Finding Your Socks Before They Get Lost When I joined the United States Air Force, I was put in barracks with 55 other guys to complete basic training. We changed socks at least twice daily and did laundry every weekend. Imagine 55 airmen trying to match 14 pairs of socks each. Chaos, right? But, the USAF taught us a better method. We simply pinned our socks together before they went into the washer. One end of the pin had the first initial of our last name, and the other end had the last four digits of our Social Security Account Number stamped on it. That simple approach stuck with me. In fact, I have pinned my socks together ever since. But the larger lesson learned was that I should look for ways to address issues before they become problems. 2 Lessons I Learned From My Daughters Years later, when my three daughters were 10, 8 and 3, I walked into the kitchen to find several refrigerator magnets on the floor. I gathered all three girls in the kitchen and asked which one had knocked off the magnets. Looking confused, my oldest said, “Dad, those fall off all the time.” The other two quickly agreed. I asked, “You mean to tell me that these just fall off, and you put them back on the refrigerator?” “YES,” rang the chorus. That was the day we threw out the faulty magnets. It was also the day I learned two more lessons: 1. People with good intentions often do unproductive things they don’t need to be doing. My kids were picking up something and putting it away without being told, which, after all, is good! But, was it something that needed to be done? And could we have prevented the problem? 2. Unless the process fails, you won’t even know they’re doing it. Until I saw the magnets on the floor, I had no idea they were falling. This tells me that people can be doing a great job, but they only get recognition when something goes wrong. Which makes me wonder why employees are often lauded for correcting negative customer impact issues after they happen? Where Can You Pin the Socks? As the senior vice president of customer experience for CSI, I consider the Sole Mates board the equivalent of experiencing a customer impact issue and then addressing the problem. For my teams, better customer experience is delivered by preventing the impact before it even becomes an issue at all. (And that’s probably the goal of your community bank as well.) While we have all earned the appreciation from our customers when we ride to the rescue, that concept is only important as long as it’s the exception. Pinning socks and picking up magnets taught me more than a few lessons about housekeeping—they taught me that, in business, the most effective customer experience systems prevent problems before they happen. So, I challenge you to implement a customer experience system that rewards your staff for proactively thwarting customer impact issues. And how do you do that? You start by finding opportunities to “pin the socks.” Andy Elliott is senior vice president of customer experience for CSI. In his role, he oversees customer relationships, ensuring high-quality experiences and superior support initiatives are enacted across the CSI customer base. Andy has a diverse background in customer service, corporate communi- cations, conversions and education services.