Coronavirus/COVID-19 Reactions and Observations from Community Bankers

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, March 18th, 2020 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook over here at WSI Digital where we work with our clients on helping them connect and engage with their customers online. I will give you a little bit of a forewarning, it seems like everybody and their brother given today's coronavirus COVID-19 scenario is using online services like GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, Zoom, etc., to get access remotely. We've been having technical difficulties with our GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar system, and I am just excited that I actually was able to get connected today. So if you're having problems or if we get cut off, I just wanted to give you a heads up that It's not you or us. I think it's just these platforms are gonna have to increase capacity and one of the many things that we need to worry about in today's day and age, given the circumstances. So with that little warning slash notification out of the way, those of you that are able to join live, and there are a few of you, so good to see that you got through the GoToWebinar. gauntlet and were able to get actually on the show. Appreciate you joining me. And for those of you that are listening, this is probably going to be a relatively quick show, but I wanted to chat with you on a few things. If you've got thoughts, questions, or comments and you are live and you want to maybe offer up some observations or whatnot, by all means, please feel free to do so. But what I wanted to chat about Today, and you know I've talked about it a number of times here on the show, we primarily work with financial institutions, community banks, if you will, around the country, and many of them, and chances are you're probably a customer of a bank or a member of a credit union, and they're probably seeing notifications from those folks letting you know of different things that are going on within their organization as well as other businesses. That are having to change the way that they're doing business in order to abide by social distancing rules. A lot of the conferences and events that I was committed to speaking at over the next couple of months have been postponed. Fortunately, none of them have said they're canceled and not going to happen at all. Actually had our very first event postponed to August and got a notification from the event organizer and Lucky for me, that slot was actually open. So I think we're going to be seeing more and more of that. But what I wanted to talk about today, and certainly if you've got thoughts or things that you've seen from other businesses, feel free to put it in the chat and let me know. But what I wanted to talk about today is just the different things that the businesses that we work with, again, primarily the community banks, what they're doing. To try to keep themselves safe and their customers safe, but still maintain business operations and doing what they can to help support their communities. Because a lot of the customers of banks are small business owners, and when you're told as a restaurant or a bar or, you know, someplace where you rely on foot traffic and people coming in to see you that you have to shut your doors for 2 weeks, that can be a very troubling, challenging, and maybe even financially ruining scenario where you just might not be able to reopen your doors after this whole coronavirus thing blows over. So a couple of things, and I facilitate a handful of marketing forums for some states in the Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois area. And we've been communicating with each other, just sharing ideas and thoughts, plus paying attention to what other folks that I know around the country are doing as it relates to trying to keep their institutions afloat and aware of what's going on. Some of the suggestions that they've implemented that you might be able to do— and again, I don't know what industry you're in or how this really impacts you, but They are going out and proactively purchasing gift cards from some of these local businesses. So they're giving them some financial support. The gift cards may not get used for a couple of months as these gift cards are given away through raffles and contests and other sorts of online or social engagement as a symbol of supporting the local economy. But also, at the end of the day, who doesn't like to win stuff, right? So being able to then share that information and have that, you know, opportunity to give your customers and your fans and your followers something kind of cool that they can use, but also you're helping to put some money in the cash register of local businesses that might not otherwise be getting business. A number of the banks that we know are taking an extra step, and for those employees that they have not sent home or said you need to work remotely. For those that are in the office, they are participating, or I guess frequenting, the restaurants that are offering in-home or takeout delivery, and they're buying lunch and breakfast and dinner for anybody that's at the office, putting in extra hours trying to keep their business running and making sure that they're supporting the restaurants that are out there, that you may not be able to go into the restaurant, but they're still producing food, they're still cooking meals, they're still putting out a good product that they want you to enjoy. You just can't do it right there in the restaurant. So that's another interesting idea. As a public service announcement, as it relates to what you should be doing, or maybe more so what you should not be doing as it relates to any money that you have in the bank or in a credit union, It's important that you don't panic. And when I was a banker, we went through this thing called Y2K. And I don't know, depending on your age or where you were at in your professional career during the 1999 to 2000 transition, but there was certainly a lot more time to build up to Y2K because we knew that it was coming. But there was a lot of speculation and concern from folks that were worried that the Y2K 1999 to 2000 switch would disrupt computers, that the systems would go down, that people would lose information and platforms would crash and we would lose electricity and the internet would, would crumble. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. But during that process, financial institutions, and as a community banker at that time, took an awful lot of proactive effort to educate customers and to make sure that people knew not to pull your money. Your money is in a bank. It is FDIC insured. The FDIC insurance was created to ensure, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government, that you would not lose money in the event of a bank failure or any other scenario that would cause for a bank to go out of business, your money is protected. They have increased that limit to $250,000. Back when I was a banker, that limit was $100,000. There are other programs that banks can also offer that will offer the ability for you to have multi-million dollar insurance. There's a platform out there from a company called Promontory Interfinancial Network, which offers a platform called Cedars Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service. I don't know how many of you have millions of dollars in the bank and are concerned about being over FDIC insurance limits, but if you do, that's probably a good problem to have. But it's also important to know that there are options out there so you can ensure that your money is protected and it is safe. There are some institutions that I've heard of that are are sending out temporary restrictions on the ability to withdraw money from the institution. That is not to say that they're worried that the institution's gonna go under or it's gonna fail, but you can only have so much money within the bank and there just needs to be, I guess, a prudent and controllable way of making sure that if you do wanna come in and get your money, You certainly have the ability to do that, but don't expect to be able to walk in and pull all of your money out and say, I want all of my money in cash. One, that's not a very good and safe decision to make because now all of that money is in your hands. And if you take it home and you put it in the mattress or stick it in your wall, whatever the case may be, somebody burglarizes your home, your home burns down, something bad happens, that money is not recoverable. When you keep it with within the institution, it is safe and it is secure. So definitely I recommend not doing a run on the bank, not panicking. That's the worst thing that you can do at this point, in my opinion. So just a couple of things that, that they're doing. Again, if you are on and you've heard of other businesses doing things to support, I know even for banks that have closed their lobby just to try to minimize interaction and the likelihood of spreading something, if it should exist within either the customer or at the bank, they are making arrangements to meet with individuals on an appointment basis because there's certainly just some things that you can't do through a drive-through or remotely through online banking. So they are making accommodations that way. I know that the delivery services, you know, different sorts of ways to get goods and services to point A to point B, I would also make a point of maybe going above and beyond and thanking the folks that are out there probably doing a little bit of overtime. I'm thinking of anybody that's in the grocery store or, you know, postal, the Amazon delivery people. Everybody's now hunkering down, and when you show up first thing in the morning, the only way that those shelves are getting replenished when the day before they were completely bare is there's a lot of people that are involved in making that happen overnight, and they deserve thanks and a little appreciation, I'm sure, certainly would go a long way and be very much appreciated. A couple of the other things, just to kind of give some other observations of what people are doing. Certainly, if you have an email list, and I think if nothing else, this reinforces the importance If you don't have a good email list today, this is one of the things that you may want to put on your shortlist for once the dust settles. Being able to quickly and easily communicate with your customers and your prospects and your connections and anybody else that would like to know what's going on about your business. I know we're taking a real hard look at our marketing automation platform to determine, you know, what lists we have, who we have contact information for. We've been putting out formal information as it relates to how our business is prepared to handle this crisis and our employees and staff working remotely and working from home and continuing to be able to be available for service and support. But if you, if you don't have a good email list, that's something that you definitely want to make sure that you put on your list. It's also reinforcing the importance of having a flexible and easy-to-use, easy-to-update web platform, a content management system with blogging capability, or working with someone that is your, your right hand, right arm, basically partner, if you will, being able to put up emergency pages, status updates, being able to communicate very quickly. I know there's a lot of folks that are sharing updates and posts and notifications on social media, and I don't anticipate that social media is going to go away, but as more people flock to Facebook and LinkedIn, that may cause network interruption, might cause the platforms to have problems. And if you've got that content and that information on your website, it just puts it in an environment that you've got total control over. So we're seeing actually a lot more of our customers interested in doing things like blog posts and having these sorts of Easily updatable alerts and notifications, warning bars on the homepage that provide a quick link to their COVID updates and security hours, other sorts of things that are changing. So that's another area that I think you need to think about. And then lastly, one of the other platforms that's probably one of the newer partners of ours here within WSI is a company by the name of MobileMonkey. There's a number of platforms out there like MobileMonkey. They are at the heart a Facebook Messenger bot company that really kind of came on using their technology to provide a little bit of AI and automation on top of Facebook's Messenger program for communication and chat. They have since added functionality for SMS text messages and being able to communicate even if somebody doesn't have a Messenger. They can opt into a text message thread, and then that gives you as a business owner the ability to generate text messages. People can opt into those and they can get updates directly on their phone. So even if you are using email, everybody's using email, one of the ways to break outside of that and maybe get more noticed, or if it's a really important, you know, you are shutting down, you are limiting office hours, a text message, as we all can attest, is much more likely to see your eyeballs and to grab your attention because it's not nearly as populated with content as your typical email inbox. So we are in the process of working closely with MobileMonkey to try to develop a special kind of interim short-term reduced cost plan that would allow for you to take advantage of at least the text message communication capabilities. So you would get a mobile phone number, you'd get a special keyword that people could use, and then they would have the ability to text that information in. They would opt into your message notification service, and then from a web-based dashboard at MobileMonkey, you'd be able to blast out notifications and send people text messages instead of one at a time, 50, 100, 200 people. So if that is anything that you are interested in and being part of our special reduced kind of emergency notification platform, I would encourage you to get in touch with us here at WSI and, and just let me know. Send me an email, eric@poweredbywsi.com, and I'd be happy to add you to the list and get you some more info. The last thing that I want to mention, and then like I said, we're probably just going to keep today's webinar short, is if you visit our website at poweredbywsi.com, I wrote a blog post yesterday that might also have some interesting information for you to check out. So if you visit us and go to our blog, you can see this article here about staying connected, productive, and informed. A couple interesting things that I've caught just in the news recently and read through some things that you may not be aware of is, as it relates to being productive, informed, and connected, Zoom— I know we use GoToWebinar, some of our other colleagues use Zoom, but it's, it's pretty cool to see Zoom offering free services for K-12 students. So there's a link there where you can learn more about what Zoom's got going on. Whether you are a LinkedIn Learning user, which typically comes with their premium services or not, you now have access to a handful of LinkedIn Learning courses that you can get access to directly through this link and figure out or learn about, you know, remaining productive. If you've not been someone that's ever really had to work from home or you're not comfortable running meetings by a webinar, there's some really great course material out there that LinkedIn is offering for free. You do not need to be part of the Sales Navigator LinkedIn Learning subscription service. The new New York Times, while you can certainly buy a subscription and get their information, they have ungated or put outside of their paywall any of the coronavirus content that they're producing. So there's a link to New York Times. They're a pretty good resource of information and tend to have a pretty objective way of providing information. And so you can get access to all their information for free without being a subscriber. Google and Microsoft are making their enterprise conferencing tools available at no additional cost. I put a reminder in here about keeping in touch with your customers and your employees. You can go live using Facebook Live, you can use Periscope, you can do live video on Instagram. So many of us may not be overtly comfortable with live video yet, but Desperate times call for desperate measures. It may be time for you just to buck up and figure out how to become comfortable on live video, especially if you're a business owner or someone that's in charge of your organization, making sure that you've got the ability to communicate with those that are interested. If they can see you, they can interact with you, that's going to make it a whole lot more likely that they're going to have faith and confidence in your plan and know what it is that you're doing to take care of them. Certainly the real news, and these links are going around all over the place, but wouldn't be right to have an article about this without them, the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control. We've got the official links for those. We also published a formal statement to our customers, went out last week to let them know our business is functioning as normal. They can contact us using our support ticketing system, letting all of our customers know that our employees always have been and continue to be very comfortable working remotely and maintaining our social distance. But that's, you know, as a virtual organization, we've been doing that for a number of years, and it just kind of further validates that our business plan is actually one that is at least coronavirus-friendly, if you will. And then the last thing, Ellie from our team actually put together a nice short little video that just provides 5 steps. You're more than welcome to share this, but 5 different things that you can do just to keep top of mind to ensure that you're remaining safe and healthy during this rather unique set of circumstances as everybody's getting locked down and avoiding each other and and whatnot. So I think the biggest thing that we're recommending to all of our customers, and certainly want to recommend to you here on Free Webinar Wednesdays, is don't feel like you can overcommunicate too much. If there's a question that you have, if there is an update that you want to share, I would say share it because— or ask the question. If there's businesses that you're working with, we've actually had a number of our customers reach out to us and say, You know, are you guys okay? Is everything all right? And so we started getting those and realized, you know, hey, it was time for us to put out an official statement just to make sure that they're reassured and they know exactly what's going on. Some future steps that we'll be doing, more than likely, we actually are using the Vidyard GoVideo tool, which I've talked about here on Free Webinar Wednesdays before, but If you're not familiar with it, that GoVideo tool allows for you to create video messages right from your computer. You can save those, you can embed them directly into an email. It's not live video like Facebook Live, but it does give you the ability to have a direct contact video message that can go out to your customers. We're likely going to be using that to communicate to some of our clients, or I guess all of our clients, to just ensure that they can see me, they can see others on the team. They know exactly what's going on. They know that we're still here. So as a reminder, if you've got a question or a thought, by all means, please feel free to use the chat functionality. And hold on just a second. Looks like somebody might have— yes, we did. Thank you. Thank you, Patty. We— so during Plenty of water, not drink plenty of weather. The challenge with spellcheck is weather is spelled right, but it's not used in the right spot. So we will get in and make a change to that and ensure that drink plenty of water to stay hydrated is fixed. So good job. If you happen to catch any more typos, 'cause I think I wrote this pretty early in the morning, by all means let me know. But yeah, it's good to know that people are reading it. So thank you very much for that catch. And she says she's a teacher, so, and looks like a very good one at that. And I'm sure you probably have some challenges in your own— I don't know what age ranges you teach, but I know with a lot of schools being closed, having to shift educational sessions and learning to a Zoom-based environment and being able to communicate. We don't have children. We have a couple of— well, We don't have human children. We have a couple of golden retrievers that they don't really care what's going on at this point because we've always been home. But those of you that have children, I know that's a completely different wrinkle as it relates to things like childcare and keeping the kids busy. And, you know, you want to— I suspect the balance of being on the phone. I know one of the things prior to this is, you know, you didn't want your kids texting all their friends all of the time. Get out, be with people, see your friends, you know, have fun. Have those in-person, real-time connections. And now we're doing exactly the opposite, where kids are having to stay indoors. They're not allowed to go to school. They're not allowed to hang out with friends. Or if they do, it has to be in much smaller groups, and they got to stay 6 feet away from each other. So teachers and educators and, and parents are certainly another area that probably deserves a lot of admiration and, uh, and thanks. So, um, she says, yes, it has been difficult. Also an administrator for a nonprofit. Um, and, uh, absolutely, we're happy to help out however we can. So, um, so find groups that you can maybe gravitate towards. I know the groups that I help to moderate, it's been very beneficial even though all 4 of the states aren't communicating with each other. If I come across an idea that one of the banks in Illinois shares, then I'll grab that and I'll share it generically, of course, but I'll share that idea to the other 3 states and to be able to make sure that I see my role as a moderator and a facilitator of that is just to help make sure that that communication goes back and forth. and is shared amongst different groups. And I know that there's a lot of groups that are out there. I know my hometown in Marshall, Michigan has created a COVID-19 small business support group. And many of the small business owners and community members in Marshall are coming together in that group and offering up advice if people need donations, if they're looking for, you know, hey, support this business or do these sorts of things. Social media is definitely a tool that we can use to bring each other together and to stay connected as well. So I want to encourage you to do that. And if you find or come across any good examples of, you know, community groups that have spawned up that are doing a good job, by all means, feel free to share those with me. And I'd love to, I'd love to hear what you're finding. So With, with that, I'm going to go ahead. One more little thing here. We plan in-person continuing education meetings for healthcare professionals. Due to COVID-19, they are not being allowed to travel at all because it's all hands on deck. Trying to be supportive to the groups and love the idea of bringing in lunch, dinner from staff, local restaurants. That are still providing takeout. Absolutely. I think that, again, it just shows you that you're supporting the business, you're helping them maintain a little bit of cash flow. One of the other things that that kind of brings to mind, and it's not that you're going to use this as an opportunity to capitalize on your brand, but we're also encouraging all of our customers just to make sure, and even for us internally, Document the good as well as the bad, but probably hopefully more of the good that is coming out of this. I know we've received a lot of really nice comments from our customers, and you know the board met needs to put notification on the website. There was nothing in place. How do we let our customers know? And fortunately, we've been able to react very quickly, and our customers are sending us accolades like you're a lifesaver. Thank you so much. You guys reacted so quickly before I. Even told my president we were going to do this, it was done. You know, we're recording that and we're saving it mainly because it's always good to go back when things get really stressful and we don't know how long this is really going to take. It gives you a nice area to spend some time just to recharge your batteries and know that what you're doing really does make a difference and that those you're serving really are appreciative of your work. So don't be shy about You know, recording some of those things. And who knows, you may be able to use some of that after the dust settles and this all becomes an event in our rearview mirrors, and we can go back and what can we learn from it, what can we do differently, what we can do better. Because, you know, there's going to be things like this that are going to come around that we just need to all be prepared for and have a plan for. So anyway, with that, I'm going to go ahead. Looks like the question/comment queue is empty, but those of you that didn't take some time to share your thoughts. Much appreciated. Our teachers and our educators and the folks that are in retail, you know, support them how you can, and together we'll all get through this, I'm sure. It's just gonna be a bumpy road, but we'll get through it. So thanks for joining me on Free Webinar Wednesdays. I'll look forward to seeing you on a future show down the road. Again, please feel free to To reach out to me directly if you've got thoughts or ideas or you'd like to just share a success story. I'm kind of on the lookout for other great things that are happening and doing my best to share the positive. So if you got any of that that you'd like to send my way, please feel free to do so. But with that, stay safe, stay clean, wash your hands, and we'll, uh, we'll see you on a future episode down the road. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.