Ever heard of the saying ‘don’t judge
a book by its cover?” Yes don’t!
The practice of determining the
extent of quality service to be rendered a customer by their account balance is
common among bankers.
It is a common practice for bankers to render service
to customers on the basis of their account balance and as expected, more
priority is usually given to customers of fat account balances over the ones
without as much. This mentality and practice is wrong in so many unimaginable
ways and causes a lot of unbelievable damages to the total output of the bank
and even the culprit.
You probably may want to defend
this act by quoting the Pareto Principle which states that 20% of the invested
input is responsible for 80% of the results obtained and as such only 20% of
your customers deserve the 80% of your time. Well you are wrong! and yes I was
a culprit myself until after an experience which I will share later on this
post. Bankers take advantage of this Pareto’s Principle and use it a lot as
excuses for so many wrong deeds. We understood it differently or rather chose
to understand it in our own way. We chose to understand it as having to only
focus on the 20% of our customers who we believed were responsible for 80% of our
CABAL (Total Deposit). We believed also that as long as you do not contribute
to the 80% of our total CABAL, then you deserved on 20% of our attention. Sadly,
this is still the attitude and mentality of majority of bankers out there. It is
a wrong mindset, a wrong idea and very wrong attitude! It is very unhealthy to render
different levels of services to customers on the basis of their account
balance.
As a banker, you should always
understand that the bank is a service organization charged with the primary
responsibility of rendering excellent customer service delivery at all time. It
is also imperative to understand that amongst all other things, customers are
your most valuable assets. One of the hazardous effect of rendering services on
the basis of customer’s account balance is that it portrays you as two-faced
and unprofessional and as such your outcome to the job and the bank will be
poor. You need to maintain a character at all times. Don’t be classy in service
delivery at one point and fail to be at another. Customers are key and
deserving of an excellent service all the time.
Now here is one eye opening
experience I had as a banker. My very well respected customer (because of his
account balance) went to another branch different from mine (where his account
is originally domiciled) to carry out a transaction. This customer has ranked
the top position for over eight months in terms of his huge account balance and
had just transferred all of these funds just a week ago and expecting 3times more.
His account balance on this fateful day was close to nothing and wanted to make
a little withdrawal. Being a very observant and patient man, he took his time
to record the service he got from the front desk officer of that branch. The
lady attending to him never looked at him even for a second after checking his
account balance. She didn’t even bother to offer him a seat let alone treat his
request. She was more excited to treat other customers’ request who had more
tangible balances in their account (I guess she didn’t even take note of his
last balance in the account before the withdrawal). It was a 7 minutes video
and he sent it to me afterwards. Now imagine that! She never understood that
going by her judgments, that customer who she just treated in that manner could
probably double the total deposit position of her branch. How I wish she knew
that all customers were key and important. I knew I could have been guilty of
same just as many others and as such, used that incident as a lesson. This
orientation is wrong, the practice is endemic in the industry and easily
transferable and bankers should make efforts to stop it. You can make
conscious effort to avoid it by simply recognizing the fact that every customer
is important and make up the total output of the bank at every given time.
Professionalism towards the disposition of your duty is key and being
professional simply means not segregating or having to see a customer’s account
balance first before choosing the level of service to render.
Have a pleasant week ahead!
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