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.

Nagging (Real) Estate Agents

I’m currently trying to sell my house; privately without a (Real) Estate agent. Why give 3.7% of the value of your house to someone else when the Internet can get interest?But the agencies see the same ads that everyone else does and they call. So one called and tried to argue with me that I had to let him see the house and that we should “work together”. How can I work “with” someone who is that pushy?You need to be really careful when selling to build the relationship and respect both parties; even if you’re a (Real) Estate agent. 

Why make me wait

Yesterday morning I dropped off the car for some planned repairs. The queue at the service desk was short and they saw me quickly (great! I was on my way to work and in a rush)… but then it took them half an hour to give me the curtesy car. During this time, I was watching them having started work on my car already.So what’s the problem? You’re blatently showing that your time and efficiency is more important than that of your customer. There is no need to keep your customer waiting around all this time. It’s good that you are efficient (the customer gets the overall service done quickly) but the touchpoint here requires the customer to be in and out as quickly as possible.Takeaways:It’s not just the final service that counts, it’s all the touchpoints with your customer along the way and will make them come back. The whole product is the whole service experience. 

Language is the issue!

Yesterday I flew BMI, which I usually do for the good service. However coming into Brussels airport I noticed that they played a recorded message in Dutch only, and not French. What’s the issue with that? Well just under half the Belgian population speaks French and the other half Dutch. Why annoy half of your customers like that? I’m sure that BMI have that same message recorded in French for when they land at French airports.