Beyond Training: Building a Service and Sales Culture (259.1 kb)

A Practical Guide for Achieving Excellence in Today's Competitive Marketplace.

Financial institutions face a myriad of obstacles on their journey to service and sales excellence. They are confronted by a marketplace that grows infinitely more competitive every day. They are challenged by customers who are constantly seeking new and improved products and services...

Bridging the Gap - The Value in Integrating, Balancing and Creating Synergy Between Sales and Risk Management (637.1 kb)

Ask the leader of any commercial financial institution, "What keeps you up at night?" and you will likely hear a myriad of descriptions about the same core challenge - balancing the need to minimize risk with the need to sustain profitable growth.

At the crux of this paradox are the traditional models of credit and sales in which credit decision-making is exclusively focused on uncovering and minimizing risks in loan deals while sales is focused on account acquisition, expansion and growth...

Delivering Profitable Advisory Services: A Best Practices Approach (367.2 kb)

"Financial advice is at a critical turning point. The demand for advice is steadily growing, while investment products that competitors offer become increasingly similar, if not identical."

Financial institutions are facing two critical challenges that will make or break their success in attracting and retaining the upscale client. The first is the ability to respond to the steadily growing demand for advice by the affluent and the emerging affluent. And the second is the capability to deliver that advice profitably.

Financial services companies now offer investment products that are similar, if not identical, to competitive offerings. Once consumers recognize that they can purchase the same product from almost any provider, both the product and its distribution become commodities...

Blended Learning: Why Everything Old is New Again - but Better (197.6 kb)

In this increasingly complex and competitive financial services environment, you face quarter-to quarter, even month-to-month pressure to produce measurable gains. To succeed, you need that competitive weapon—the best trained, most capable workforce available. And to keep your workforce at its best, you need to maintain a learning environment that creates continuous improvement to keep pace with the continually changing marketplace...

Creating a Robust Credit Culture: Lessons from the Asian Economic Crisis (211.0 kb)
One Region's Burden is an Education for All

In the years since the Asian economic crisis erupted in 1997, many banks in the region have been forced to focus almost exclusively on survival and the management of huge, non-performing loan portfolios. In spite of their best efforts, these loans are still estimated at $2 trillion, or almost 30 percent of regional GDP. Nevertheless, some banks have made substantial progress. They have happily reached the stage where they can direct their attention to the marketplace again.

The best of these banks have realized they cannot fall back on the old ways of doing things. They understand that asset growth for growth’s sake doesn’t necessarily bring shareholder value, and that setting asset targets without a robust and supportive credit culture can be a recipe for disaster...

Ignite The Power Of Relationships For Sales And Service Excellence (208.8 kb)

How the Dynamic Customer Experience will Improve Business Performance

Today's financial services industry is fiercely competitive and long-term success is becoming more and more elusive for many of the players. Financial centers must open their doors more days and for longer hours. Customers have more choices than ever before when it comes to commodity products, and many financial services are so similar from one institution to the next that they are becoming commodities...

Is Your Contact Center Aligned or Maligned? (186.1 kb)

A Six-Part Action Plan to Build a Positive Image, Shape Internal Perception, and Maximize the Potential of this Powerful Delivery Channel

The call center of yesterday, employed primarily as a cost-saving service support function, has transformed into the contact center of today, a delivery channel capable of generating revenue, gathering important marketing data, educating customers, and much more. Yet despite its great potential, the contact center is frequently misunderstood by other internal groups and often perceived as an entity separate from the enterprise—a situation that affects customer satisfaction, employee morale, and ultimately the bottom-line.

Managing For Results: It's Not Rocket Science (265.0 kb)

"Managing for Results is not rocket science, but a tried and proven methodical system that will produce demonstrable sales and service results for your organization. The key to success lies with all levels of management, and the practices they must adopt from the top down for Managing for Results."

Consolidation and competition in the financial services industry has intensified. In their efforts to succeed, organizations have cut expenses and downsized staff, increased revenue and service goals, and increased efforts to find, develop, keep, and grow profitable customer relationships.

Those relationships don't come easy. Today's customers compare their banking experiences to all of their other service experiences, whether it's shopping in a supermarket, resolving a problem via a call to a department store's contact center, or flying the airlines to a vacation destination. They demand quality service-a dynamic customer experience that meets or exceeds all of their expectations—or they are likely to move their business elsewhere...

Online Learning: How To Sucessfully Apply It To Your Organization (866.8 kb)

The existence of the website Dancetv.com - which offers free online instruction in ballroom dancing - may have special meaning for those who remember the earliest days of online learning. In those days, research demonstrated online learning's capabilities, while its opponents argued, "It may be good for chemistry or computer science, but it will never be able to teach you to dance!"

If people are going to the web to learn ballroom dancing, is it safe to say that human-based instruction has fallen to the superior power of technology? Will classroom teaching now go the way of typesetting machines, switchboards, and mechanical calculators...

Strategic Relationship Management (203.9 kb)

Three Key Steps to Deliberate, Consistent Loan Management

Commercial loan losses are up. At the same time loan quality is eroding, lenders are under pressure to sustain profitable growth and keep competitors at bay.

What's a commercial lender to do - veer from aggressive business development, restrict loan standards and risk loss of credibility with clients and the marketplace? Or ignore warning signals, risk loan loss and incur the enormous cost of being out of the market while dealing with problems?

The answer is assertive selling and diligence in initial underwriting must be matched with deliberate, consistent management of loans already booked. How does a bank implement this approach and remain competitive? It does so through strategic relationship management, which includes three key steps: monitor performance, evaluate changes in risk and opportunity, and take appropriate action...