Excellent!

The movie “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” made a cliché of the word “excellent” just as “brilliant” seems to be the latest clichéd expression from the UK today. Excellence is now an embedded component of business and banking culture. Ever since Tom Peters, excellence has been a mantra that rarely fails to bring nods of approval in management committees around the world.

There’s an article on destinationcrm.com by Lior Arussy, entitled “The Excellence Myth” an excerpt from his book, Excellence Every Day. His position is that while companies talk about pursuing excellence, they generally go out of their way to make it hard for their employees to deliver it. He thinks (and I agree) that the only way to achieve excellence is to enable your employees to make that happen.

He also states that “There is nothing more powerful than listening to your customers. A simple message delivered in the voice of the customer can be more insightful than hundreds of pie charts and Excel spreadsheets.” And he goes on to say that executives should take the time to visit customers in their own environments, a terrific idea that would do much to actually improve customer experience in banking.

In a past life I worked at a bank that required all senior officers to visit a bank branch and perform one of the branch functions for four hours every quarter, and if you missed, you risked your bonus. It was incredibly valuable because we got to see the impact of our decisions (or lack thereof) on the people who had to implement them, and we saw the reaction that customers had to our institution. More recently, I participated in a session where customers and front line staff were brought into meetings with senior managers, which accomplished the same purpose.

In every instance where I’ve had the chance to listen to customers and employees directly, my reaction has been the same…incredible respect and humility. Listening to a customer tell you about her inability to change her name on a DDA after her marriage, or to an associate tell you about how he is put in the same queue as customers to resolve credit card problems, can only make you realize that there is much to be done to get service in financial services to a universally acceptable level. Excellence indeed. Adequacy is a more appropriate goal.

I suggest that instead of being Bill and Ted and spouting clichés about excellence, all of us should go hang out at a branch for a few hours or sit as a CSR in a call center. That experience will do more to move the quality of service delivery forward than a thousand consultants or a hundred blogs (even this one).