My Credit Union Just Lowered the Bar on Bad Customer Experiences

Have you been fooled by a company you have done business with for many, many years? When I say fooled, I mean the broken kind of trust fooled. And yes Seth, I do want to talk about it. It involves bad customer experiences that my daughter and her husband had with their credit union. Turns out it is our credit union also.

You can’t fool people all the time, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.

–Seth Godin

Michelle and Matt are the victims here. They were in the process of a mortgage approval with another bank (purchasing a new home and the builder’s company offered a good deal and speedy approval). During the process, they received a telephone call from the new banker wanting to know what the payments of $836 over the past 9 months to their credit union were for. They had no idea.

But here was the deal. The credit union was charging them $3 each to transfer money from their savings to their checking account for the first 6 transfers each month. After the first 6, the fee for the transfer was $25 for each transfer. This was going on for 9 months with no communication from the credit union whatsoever (totaling $836 in fees during that time). So $836 in fees for using their own money. When they called for an explanation, the bank’s only response in that was their policy on fees for that type of transfer. End of explanation.

Their next move was letters to the bank CEO and the member services committee, explaining the situation. Here is a copy of their letter:

We have been Visions Credit Union members since we graduated from college 15 years ago. Until now, Visions is the only bank with whom we have done business. The same is true for my husband. That is something that will change. Let us explain.

Over the last few weeks, we have been in the process of buying a new house and selling our old one. As a result, we have been in the process of a loan certification process. One question that surprised us was why we had paid Visions $836 over the last 9 months to use our own money. In doing research on the question, we realized you have charged us a $3.00 service charge to automatically transfer from our savings account to our checking account. And to top that, once we reached 6 transfers per month the service charge went to $25 per transfer.

We went back over our correspondence with Visions and could find no notification of the change in your process of adding service charges to move our money from one account to the other. We accept responsibility for not reviewing our account on a regular basis. But to our defense, a sense of trust was involved on our part. That was obviously a big mistake.

After our research on the issue, we immediately called Visions to discuss the issue and seek a refund. Your response: there was nothing you were going to do because your process was to respond to appeals only and we had 30 days to appeal each service charge. This is a very poor response for 15-year loyal customers holding a mortgage, home equity loan, and a respectable amount of money in our savings and checking accounts. We asked why this had happened and your response was that this was according to your policy. We asked why, when we had over $10,000 in our accounts, we were being charged anything. Again, we were told that was your policy.

We are sending this letter to you, as bank CEO, because we feel it was important for you to hear concerns such as these, directly from your members and not your staff. We believe it is a crucial reason you are losing valuable customers.

We accept responsibility for not checking our account each month. But we trusted we would hear from you if there were issues. But that was not the case.

Given that we have researched what other banks do in similar situations (nothing close in terms of fee policies) and our lack of trust in your bank, we will be selecting a new bank.

Why are we sending this letter directly to you? It is simple. You apparently are the only one with the ability to deal with this issue and consider changing your policies.

Sincerely,

Matt and Michelle Ellis

So what was the response? The Vice President in charge of Member Services called our daughter and could not have been more apologetic. He said that he and the CEO had been with the credit union for a little over a year and were in the process of reviewing all fee processes and putting them in line with their competitors.

These fees were clearly not good policy or in line with the competition. He returned the $836 in fees completely. He also stated that they were giving the branch manager much more ability to make decisions with customers. Certainly much needed, don’t you think?

(Want to see how another company handled a bad situation? … How Marriott Courtyard Turned Customer Failure into Service Recovery)

Key takeaways

All we can say is that good customer experiences start and end with effective communication. In this case, the absence of communications created the significance of the surprise, didn’t it? They also greatly depend on keeping up with the competition … it is a comparative thing. And finally, employee empowerment is a necessity. Without good empowerment, things can get out of hand in a hurry.

Do you have a lesson about making your customer focus better that you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.

It’s up to you to keep improving your customer attention and focus. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons. When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

More reading on customer focus from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

10 Laws of Customer Experience Design What Little Things Small Businesses Can Do To Build Customer Relationships Customer Experience Improvements Begin with Understanding Their Value

Marketing Information and Advocacy Advertising: Simple Rules

It is a simple concept. People don’t read ads, they read what interests them. So if you are going to generate advertising and design, you are going to have to create an interesting copy. And, oh, by the way, it must be more interesting than the millions of other advertisements out there. Now that is a daunting task, isn’t it? Prudential marketing has sought to overcome this dilemma with marketing information and advocacy advertising as its power of persuasion.

Does it have the power to encourage the right sort of conversations?

Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.

-Seth Godin

Before we continue, let me ask you a question.

What works best for advertising design in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? Be the one who starts a conversation.

With the advent of the Internet, the number of marketing options available to both budding and experienced entrepreneurs has become staggering.

According to Nielsen, there are 27,000,000 pieces of content are shared each day. And Statistic Brain says that our average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds – one second less than a goldfish!

We check our phones 150 times per day. We check our email up to 30 times an hour. And the amount of information in the world continues to double every 18 months.

All this available information and data is creating a battle for customer attention between brands, publishers, and every one of us who creates marketing content. But more importantly, it’s forcing businesses to think more and more as creative designers.

It has been said that advertising is the price to be paid for being unremarkable. That may be true, but I have noticed, despite the growth in online marketing, that even remarkable businesses also advertise the old fashion way.

It is a key component of your marketing campaign, for awareness or consumer education of your value. If everyone is creating content, how does a business break through the noise? How do we reach our customers in a way that engages them?

So what is advocacy advertising? It is a specific type of advertising that intends to promote a particular idea related to public discourse, viewpoints, and causes, in contrast to typical ads which intend to promote a product or a service.

Let’s examine 3 Prudential TV advocacy ads that are part of the Prudential marketing campaign:

The first ad

The first ad asks the audience several the questions:

How old is the oldest person you know?

How do you make sure you have enough money to enjoy all these retirement years?

The theme of this ad? Let’s get ready for a longer retirement. Makes you think about some crucial questions, doesn’t it?

The second ad

In the second ad, Prudential asked people:

If you could do something you really love, what would you do?

Your retirement should bring you to the answer. Prudential can help prepare you for retirement. Let’s prepare today to do what we love tomorrow.

In the third ad, Prudential ask customers how much money they would need in retirement. Trying to figure out exactly how much money you’ll need to retire is difficult. Let alone trying to make that amount last for potentially 30 or 40 years. Luckily, there is another way to think about planning for retirement.

That is to approach things differently if we want to be ready for a long retirement. The theme here is: Together we can create a retirement income that lasts.

Advocacy advertising is a specific type of advertising that intends to promote a particular idea related to public discourse, viewpoints, and causes, in contrast to typical ads which intend to promote a product or a service.

Marketing information … Prudential Financial, Inc.

Financial institutions like Prudential are difficult businesses to advertise in the traditional sense. Check out the words on their website:

For more than 135 years, Prudential Financial, Inc., has helped customers grow and protect their wealth. Today, we have been one of the world’s largest financial services institutions with operations in the United States, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. We also have one of the most recognized and trusted brand symbols:

The Rock ®, an icon of strength, stability, expertise, and innovation. We strive to create long-term value for our stakeholders through strong business fundamentals, consistent with our mission guided by our vision and directed by our company’s core values. We are committed to keeping our promises and to doing business the right way.

But that is pretty difficult to discriminate in a way that is easily believed and remembered. So advocacy ads are a good substitute for effective advertising.

So, in summary, let’s examine Prudential’s TV ads in total, as key to the Prudential marketing campaign’s power of persuasion:

Importance of marketing information … customer personalization

Messages and content

Ask questions to get the viewer thinking. So simple that the reader will quickly understand. Keep in mind that pictures are far more valuable than words. Use simple messages complemented with powerful visuals.

Employ easy arguments. Easy arguments are the conclusions people reach using inferences without a careful review of available information. These ads clearly and simply get the messages by showing the before and after visuals.

Appeal and visual attention

The present appeal that grabs and holds consumer attention.

Interesting information is the foundation and effective visuals hold the attention. Your ad messages must be appealing to your target communities.

Visual elements should be part of the story. The truth is that the processing capacity of our brains is limited and words may get in the way of emotionally powerful visual images.

When powerful visual images dominate – when “a picture or video is worth a thousand words” – be quiet and let them do the talking.

Articles with images get 94% more views than those without. And posts with videos attract 3X more inbound links than plain text posts.

A study by 3M showed that 90% of the information sent to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.

Provide emotional connection

A good story does not interpret or explain the action in the story for the audience. Instead, it allows each member of the audience to interpret the story as he or she understands the action.

This is why people find good stories so appealing and why they find advertising that simply conveys information boring.

Experiences that trigger our emotions are saved and consolidated in lasting memory because the emotions generated by the experiences signal our brains that the experiences are important to remember.

In these ads, the questions posed to add the emotions of humor, realness, surprise, and even a little fear. disgust.

Prudential marketing … identifiable music

Match what viewers see with what they hear. People expect and prefer coordinated audio and visual messages because those messages are easier to process and understand.

Music can be a rapidly identified cue for the recall of emotional responses remembered from previous advertising.

Making the same music an identifiable aspect of all advertising signals the audience to pay attention to more important content.

Call to action

A simple call to action is needed on all ads. Say exactly why people should contact your business and what you can do for them. For example “Come home to a life that is SIMPLY MAGNIFICENT.”

Make the desired call to action a part of the story. A good story that is very entertaining but does not make a direct connection between the desired call to action and the story is just a very entertaining story. The whole point of the story in advertising is to effectively deliver the desired call to action.

If the audience does not clearly understand the desired call to action after seeing the ad, then you are missing the real opportunity.

Part of an integrated marketing campaign

Make your ad a component of an integrated marketing campaign. Proper spacing/timing are essential to the campaign. Swiffer has this element nailed in terms of ad frequency and mixing a variety of the ads so as not to annoy customers.

So if you remember one thing from this article, remember this:

Marketing or advertising, you need to create information that your customers find interesting and worth talking about and remembering.

Have any advertising experience that you would like to add to this community? Any comments or questions you like to add below?

Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?

Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

Target Market … How to Target for Best Marketing Campaigns

11 Steps to Media Framing Messages for Optimum Engagement

Digital Storytelling … 4 Ways to Employ for Message Persuasion

Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

Do You Know the Value of Creative Stories Success?

Have you seen the recent Google Reunion video where a story of long lost friends is told? The video was made by Google India, and the point, of course, is to promote Google Search. But it also reaches a new level of what can be done with the value of creative stories.

If you haven’t seen it, you can watch it here …a short 3+ minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHGDN9-oFJE

Facts don’t persuade, feelings do. And creative stories are the best way to get at those feelings.

More to study: Visual Content … 13 Remarkable Marketing Examples to Study

The story is this: a man in Delhi tells his granddaughter about his childhood friend, Yusuf. He hadn’t seen Yusuf since the Partition of India in 1947 when India and Pakistan became separate countries, and the two friends were forced to separate. The man’s granddaughter arranges for the two to meet again.

The story is simple and direct. It’s beautiful and honest, and true. The photography is spectacular. The music adds to the very good acting.

Do you use stories in your customer engagement … or perhaps in marketing messages? Good stories are a great way to develop an identity, personalize, and build your customer base. Good stories:

Immediately focus on engagement, experiences, and emotion – central tenets that are attractive to customers.

The narrative makes your message relevant and memorable through personalization.

Stories are a great means of sharing and interpreting experiences, and great experiences have this innate ability to change the way in which we view our world.

Creative story lessons

A lot of us are trying to figure out how to improve the use of storytelling as part of our marketing. Very few of us do it well. There are several things to be learned from this excellent video:

Value of creative stories: emotional connection

This video is about as emotional as it gets. Stories like this provide a chance to experience a variety of emotions without the risk of those emotions themselves. Emotions like wonder, fear, courage, or love can be tested out in the minds of those as they listen to a story.

You may remember the feelings of emotions which can trigger memories or create resolve as a result of hearing such stories. The experience of hearing stories can awaken portions of emotional lives that may have lain dormant or have not yet been explored.

Be dynamic with your stories like Google. Nothing is more important to narrative content than imagination, so give vivid descriptions and use emotional hooks and humor to get people fully engaged. This story engages us, doesn’t it? Be creative, not only with words and images but also with the methods you use to convey them. Like the music as well as the messages.

https://digitalsparkmarketing.com/creativity-ideas/

Value of creative stories … understanding others

Well-told stories can help us to learn about other cultures, ideas, and ways of thinking. They can provide opportunities to know how past generations responded to challenges. They can also let us know how new generations are encountering and dealing with similar opportunities or the new challenges they face. This video has some of each and then some.

In the background is the partition of India, a painful episode in the history of India and Pakistan. These aren’t just two old friends who haven’t seen each other for a long time. This is a creative story that builds on some big forces: politics, religion, geography, nationalism.

If you listen to your customers, as Google has, you can leverage their stories to drive your creativity. By analyzing their stories of how your products and services fit into their lives, you can gain valuable insight into their needs and desires, which can be hugely beneficial to other aspects of your business. Like product design and development and ongoing marketing strategy. The reunion has done that well don’t you think?

Growing intimacy

People are thirsty to know that they are seen and heard in our over-stimulated society. The rampant growth of “reality” TV shows certainly proves this. When personal and life stories are shared, there’s a chance to know that “I am not alone.” The two old friends certainly don’t want to be alone any longer.

Remember, stories, when properly written, pull people into a dialogue. It’s about engagement and interaction. The audience is just as active a participant as the storyteller. In contrast, many companies and brands still relentlessly push messages to their employees and into the marketplace—without meaningful context or relevancy.

The brand can be central to the story

It’s obvious that this video is promoting Google. But the use of Google is woven into the narrative in a way that feels natural. It’s not intrusive or forced. It works very effectively. Especially when it is not from Google but Google customers. Simply about how people use Google products.

The message

There are two messages in the video that are being driven home by Google. The first is that the work Google does is making a difference. It is making the world a better place by its search engine. But it’s not about technology. It’s about what people do with technology. How they apply it to solve their problems.

The second message, while a definite subset of the first, is as important. That being the old world was one where people were driven apart. But there is a change in the old world where technology is ushering in a new world.

A new world where people are brought together in a way that would not have existed a decade ago.

As a storyteller, I know my audience is experiencing one of the above benefits as they listen to my serious or funny stories. I see their breathing change, their attention focus and their foreheads wrinkle or relax. So much is happening in our shared experience.

The bottom line

“I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”

For some reason, many of us have been conditioned to be more afraid of failure than we are of inaction. However, failure, in addition to being inherently valuable as a learning process, contains within it the chance of success. And no matter how small that chance is, it’s better than the chances of success when we choose not to even try.

There are no shortcuts when it comes to crafting a quality narrative. It takes a ton of creativity as well as time, patience, planning, and polishing to give your brand’s story sparkle and make it shine. We recommend you dive into using creative stories!

Next time you are building a marketing campaign, use a great story built from these lessons.

**Customer engagement improvements are worth the effort.**

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of creative stories for your marketing. And put them to good use.

It’s up to you to keep improving your creative marketing efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your creative stories and marketing?

Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.