How to make the difference in a commodity market

Bank accounts are more or less commodities. Ok, there are some banks that have high or low rates, but most banks are in the middle with similar rates and charges. To differentiate yourself you can play around with small freebies here and multiple discounts there, just as the mobile/cell phone companies do. To all intents and purposes, as most people haven’t a clue what calls they’ll make or transactions they’ll perform next month, they can’t make a simple choice. (of course, that’s the whole point of this strategy, but that’s another blog post).

So how can you stand out?

We’re looking for a bank in Canada and sent the same e-mail to six institutions. They all replied within 48hours, so far so good. But the content of their replies really differentiated them. We sent a list of numbered questions, i.e.:

1. Can we open an account from abroad?
2. What should we do with the house sales proceeds?
3. What’s your mortgage rate?
4. What would be an appropriate current account for us?
5. etc

One bank stood-out for having replied to each question and making sure that when the agent couldn’t reply, they told us they were forwarding on to a colleague and that colleague answered in the same format.

So guess which bank got out business? Yes it was the Royal Bank of Canada, RBC.

To top it off, I had a problem during the application procedure, e-mailed RBC, and of course they replied promptly. I replied to say thank you and they spontaneously replied and re-explained the next steps in the process. Wow!

Takeaways:

In a commodity or near commodity market above average customer service can really make the difference. You can get your organisation to make the difference.

Note:

Seth Godin has a similar take on this on his blog, this time about terrible customer service from Verizon.