Banking: Relationship building or a bad sales pitch

July 5, 2021
Devinder Dhingra

Satyam (The Truth)

It has become a trend these days for bank employees to sell their bank products. The moment you step in a branch, you find sooner or later that the bank representative attending to you is attempting to sell you a product. Well, it is fair but not when the focus is on selling rather than the service; when the focus is on smart ways to sell a product somehow, even if it costs the service a customer was seeking or it amounts to cheating.

On the same lines, though it is good that a bank provides us a dedicated relationship manager (RM) where we hold our major account, when it comes to reality, we experience that most of the time the RM is either selling the bank products or is of no use.

There is no harm if banks want to utilize the services of RMs to sell the bank products as well. But before that, they need to focus on the services that an existing account holder expects from them. They need to focus on the relationship first.

If a bank representative is not keen to provide the main service and his attention remains on his own targets, they are eventually going for a bad sales pitch and perhaps in the direction of losing a customer in the long run.

Recently I visited a major bank to convert a minor account to a major account. The bank guy who attended me began by telling me that it was better to close the account and open a new one. “Why?” I asked. He had no concrete answer. It was obvious that he was focusing on completing his target of new accounts or was pushing it for some incentives.

I straightway refused and asked him to provide the account conversion form. He did not stop his smartness even then. He brought a new account opening form and told me the procedure was changed and I needed to fill that new form. His bad luck was that it was me on the other side. I had to finally use strong words to make him provide me with the right form.

What did the bank gain from it? A shaken relationship. Isn’t it?

Pushing for a new account unnecessarily in cases like this and in death claim cases where the joint account holder is unwilling to open a new account is a stupid exercise. The banks need to help the client and not force them to go their way by unethical smart moves or creating fear in the name of a changed procedure.

On top of it, the irony and the bitter truth is that most of these young bank representatives have no real knowledge of banking. Their only tools are computers and intranet. It hurts when we discover that even some of their senior guys are not aware of many of their banking procedures as they rely completely on how the system would behave.

C'mon. Computer and IT networks are to help us and not the authorities. It is we who feed the information, processes and procedures in the system and no other way around. Computers will behave the way we want them to.

Sundaram (The Guidance)

The banks need to focus on the services and help customers to resolve their issues in a cordial environment.

Once a good service is offered, the relationship enhances. And when the relationship strengthens, only then the sales pitch by a bank representative works nicely.

The banks need to remember that the customer visited them for a service that was needed. Unless and until the customer is happy with the service that he or she was seeking, pushing for sales of other products is futile, rather it may damage the existing relationship as well.

If a bank representative, in the first step itself, shifts his or her focus to selling, that I call a bad selling, then better they be defined as bank sales employees and not bank service representatives.

Secondly, all the bank employees should keep on updating their knowledge all the time related to banking and especially their own banking procedures. They must know their bank’s basic processes and procedures by heart. If a bank guy does not know how their IT system would respond to a new account opening request or for a service, it is either the bank's fault or the employee's.

IT and computers are for our convenience. We must know all the time how the system would behave instead of being a slave to it.

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