Universal Banker, Customer Profitability and Relationship Building

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, November 9th, 2016 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook and I'm with WSI Digital Marketing where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and all the cool stuff we do at WSI at www.poweredbywsi.com. I am excited. My good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins, is back from conference and able to join me on the show. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Hello everybody, this is Jeff Simpkins. I am with Community Bank Consulting, Inc. and you can learn more about me and Community Bank Consulting, Inc. online at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

Cool. I want to provide a disclosure to everybody that is joining us today live and those of you that might be listening to this on recording. I will guarantee and offer you this one promise: today's Free Webinar Wednesdays will be a politically free show. Other than that one reference of the word politics, we are not going to talk about it at all. We are going to talk about Free Webinar Wednesday stuff, and I don't know about you, but I'm pretty much sick of hearing about it, and I'm just— I'm glad that I don't have to watch the advertisements anymore. Um, and we're going to talk about some stuff that doesn't have anything to do with all of that. Um, Is that cool with you, Jeff?

Works for me.

There, I got that out of the way. So as I mentioned, those of you that are joining us for the first time, welcome. This obviously is a live show because you're here listening to us, but we do record all Free Webinar Wednesdays and make them available at freewebinarwednesdays.com, so you can check that out and share it with Others after we're done, or you can browse some of the past shows. And then also here at Free Webinar Wednesdays, we love interaction and engagement, audience. And if you've got thoughts or a question or something that you'd just like us to know, by all means, please use the chat box, even if it's just to say hello from whatever part of the world you're joining us. We would love to hear from you and like it when we get some visitor engagement. I think those are the housekeeping items I wanted to get out of the way. As I said in my intro, Jeff is back from conference and I am very excited because I can't remember, it's been a couple weeks since we've done the show together and it's good to have you back.

Thank you.

How was the conference? Tell us a little bit about it. We do have some banker friends that are in the audience so there may be some banking nuggets that they'd like to know. As is normally the case when I go to a conference, there's even stuff that applies outside of the world of banking, or everybody has a bank that they use. So it's kind of cool to just get an update on what's going on in the industry. So tell us about your event, Jeff.

Sure. So I attended and spoke at the CSI Customer Conference. CSI is a banking software provider. They provide not only core processing solutions— and for those of you not in the industry, core processing just means the systems that they keep track of all of your account balance and account information on, like your checking account, your loans, your savings accounts, your CDs, and things like that. CSI is also a big provider of network services to financial services companies. By network services, I'm talking about providing networks as a third-party provider. They also do a significant amount of compliance work in the banking industry. The focus of this year's conference was customer experience, and we had some pretty interesting speakers. One keynote speaker In particular that I'll mention. Eric, if you would bring up the website Jason Dorsey, jorsey.com. He was our millennial keynote speaker, and if you are part of an organization that you need a keynote that specializes on millennials, I can say I highly recommend him. He's based in Austin, Texas. So some interesting points that came out of this conference. You know, many financial institutions today— traditional banks, credit unions, and so forth— focus a lot of their efforts on folks that are able to maintain high balances. So those tend to be 50s, 60s, and older, baby boomers, and so forth. One of the important points that was made at this conference is that transfer of wealth is going to be happening over the next few decades. So while many of our Gen X or Millennials currently are dealing with issues like student loan debt, tend to not have a lot of excess cash and those types of things, over the decades ahead, those are going to be the customers that are going to sustain our businesses. So it's important to become aware of the way they like to do business, their characteristics, and so forth. And one of the things that was cool, and I'm going to share this, and then, Eric, perhaps we can have some discussion about it. Jason made a really good point that millennials have a tendency to like things to be very simple. They want things to be a few steps or less. So, for example, if we're talking about banking or financial services, when they go in to use their phone, which is their primary device for accessing their financial institution, they don't want to have 12 different steps to have to do something. They want to be able to get in, complete it in a few simple steps, and get on with their lives. They also like consistency. So, If they happen to be using a web browser for accessing their financial institution, which by the way is probably the exception and not the rule for most of them, they want a consistent experience that they can go very easily from using their phone, their mobile device, to using the web and not have a big learning curve. So I'm going to pause for a minute, Eric, and let you have some discussion around that.

Yeah, well, it's interesting, you talk about millennials, and again, we're going to kind of maybe dive a little deep in the world of banking, but one of the sites that I go to quite often is The Financial Brand, and just recently there was a post that talked about millennials, and I think the assumption a lot of people make, and maybe Jason also squashed some of these, I think there's a lot of assumptions that people make about millennials that they just do everything on technology, they don't care about good old-fashioned customer service, you know, their unrealistic expectations of, you know, how long it takes to achieve maybe a promotion or those sorts of things. And so one of the, I guess, myths that somewhat got crushed in this article was the fact that millennials may not necessarily be the absolute lovers of mobile payment technology and how credit cards actually seem to be the preferred method by which millennials are making payments, even though you've got iPay or Apple Pay or Android Pay or Samsung Pay. So I think it's interesting that not necessarily you or I are millennial experts, But the fact is that even what we think we might know about these millennials may not necessarily be the case. And I tweeted this out. I don't know if you caught this, Jeff, but this is a pretty interesting study that talked about what sorts of payment and their concern about security and confidentiality.

Right.

I think there's the thought that millennials just jump into stuff, they don't think twice about things, and, you know, this study kind of proves that there is some thought being paid to these areas and making an impact on their payment processes.

So the topic that I talked about at this particular conference was for financial institutions. This is something that's pretty common and a trend in both traditional banks as well as credit unions, and that is implementing a job role on the customer-facing side of the bank that we refer to as universal bankers, universal agents, or universal employees. And basically, that's rolling what traditionally were multiple job roles into a single job role. And there can be multiple levels. So if we're talking about a traditional bank, there might be a universal banker 1, universal banker 2. So a universal banker 1 essentially would be taking the roles that are traditionally filled by a teller, someone that you walk up to to make a deposit into an account or a loan payment, and a customer service or financial services representative. which is normally the person that you would interact with if you're opening a deposit account or if you have questions about your account. And this really does get back to the discussion of millennials and how they tend to like to do business, although Jason did point out in his sharing of information with us that I happen to be on the very, very, very end of the generation that's referred to as boomers. baby boomers. Many of us baby boomers actually like this as well. Millennials and others that tend to behave in a way that millennials might, we don't really like to go into our financial institutions that much anymore. We want to have the ability to when we need to interact on a personal basis with the financial institution. You want to have the ability to do it, but the days of going in on Friday afternoon with your paycheck and waiting in line to see a teller, for the most part in most markets, is not something that we're looking for anymore. So one of the things, and this tied in with the universal banker discussion that I led, is that when we're looking at our customer service as well as our technology, Millennials particularly, but those of us that, that tend to rely on technology, really like the ability for things to be handed off seamlessly. And I'll use a mortgage loan as an example of, of a great way that a financial institution can hand something off seamlessly. So let's say that you decide that you are shopping for a new mortgage loan and you start your application process online. You get as much information enter it online as you want, then you get to a point that you either feel that you have a need or you, you just want to talk to a person, sit across the desk from a person. So there are technologies that are pretty easily available to all financial institutions today that would allow the processes I described. You start the process online, you decide you need to meet with a person in person, you go into a branch of your local bank or credit union that you started this process online with, you talk with a person. Anytime you apply for a mortgage in the United States these days, there's going to be some type of documentation required. Those are typically going to be things like tax returns, bank statements, information documenting your income, your expenses, and your net worth. So all of those things are going to need to be— if you have them in a paper format, are going to need to be transitioned over to a digital format. So let's say that you don't have a scanner. Start your application process online, you go in, you meet with your friendly credit union or banker that deals with mortgage loans, they can scan them in and join them with the online information that you've already done. So another great example of integrating those technologies is the reverse. You go into the financial institution, you start your loan process online, you don't have your documentation with you, Well, a very millennial-friendly and basically financial institution customer-friendly approach is to then give them access to a portal that they can upload those documents to outside of the financial institution. So, Eric, I'm going to pause and let you add some comments here.

Yeah, well, I think, you know, while we're certainly in the banking vertical now, I think The bigger picture on this is when you look at it either from the consumer perspective and what their expectation is, or you look at it from a business's perspective and what you need to be doing with your employees, they kind of meet in the middle, where the consumers are expecting to be able to have a seamless, easy process, and I don't necessarily need to know who in the organization does mortgage loans or is responsible for financial planning. Right. All I know is I'm in the office cashing a check, on the phone, on your website, and I share a need, and this universal banker or this kind of bigger picture awareness needs to be baked into the culture of the organization so that the customer doesn't need to know who they have to ask for or what particular need they want, because in some instances they don't even know what they want. And it's our job as businesses to pick up on the fact that, oh, this person just moved to the area, they started a new job, maybe they've got a retirement plan that needs to be rolled over, maybe their spouse is doing that as well, and they might not even think that the bank can help in those areas. So getting employees to think beyond just the task that the customer is asking them for So that they can do more and help that customer save time and be more efficient. The other side, and it's funny that you say this because I just had this conversation yesterday in a strategic planning session with one of our banks, is the other side of the equation is not that you want to implement this within the business and tell your employees that, you know, hey, we got to do a culture shift and we have to do more. for our customers, because anytime you tell your employees that you're going to ask them to change their culture or change their behavior, you're going to get met with resistance because nobody likes change. But if you approach it in the sense that consumers' expectations and competitive demands are requiring us to be aware of Things like, you know, employees are going to have to start knowing a little bit more about different parts of the organization, and while we don't expect the teller to be able to do a mortgage loan, the teller is going to necessarily be able to need to understand particular cues that might maybe trigger a, hey, maybe you should talk to Jeff, he's kind of one of our mortgage lenders and he would be a good one to talk to about this, or financial planning person, or, you know, pick a different industry and insert your example there. So we actually talked just yesterday about kind of these, these 2 changes that are going on, and businesses, you know, are being pressured for efficiency and cost reduction. So employees are getting cross-trained in multiple areas, which makes them more valuable. And the expectation is, you know, you're going to have to know how to do all of this extra stuff. as part of the process. So you would think Jeff and I kind of coordinated on this and we had this all planned out, but just coincidental that, you know, what he presented on is what we were talking about with our client just yesterday in strat plan.

So you make some excellent points that, you know, while we focused our discussion up to this point on financial services, banking, credit unions, and so forth, They really apply to all industries. I think one of the points that you made that's important to underscore, you and I see this a lot in working with financial services companies, banks and credit unions, and that is the— I'm going to say the accidental tendency To become victims of siloed thinking. And the example that I'm going to use to illustrate that is when you were describing your discussions yesterday, you talked about the customer needing to know who to go to to apply for a mortgage loan, or who they need— they might have the need to know who to talk to to deal with securities and so forth. That's not the customer or prospect's responsibility. It's our responsibility as a business, whether we be a financial institution, a drugstore, a service business, or whatever, to make it as easy as possible for the customer or prospect to tell us what it is we want to do, and we make our process work for them. I'll give you a great example, and I think this is really, really important when we're looking at technology planning. Yesterday, I had a need to get a prescription drug filled, and I, well, a few months had used CVS to fill one of my prescriptions. The process was so outstanding in the way they integrated technology and accomplishing what it is I wanted to accomplish that I was almost excited to get to use it again. My doctor sends the prescription to CVS electronically. When I— when my prescription is ready, I get a little pop-up on my iPhone that says your prescription's ready. I stop at my friendly neighborhood CVS pharmacy. I go to their app. I punch a button. I get a barcode on my phone. I go to the cashier, pass the line. He or she scans the barcode. I actually sign with my finger on my screen to accept my prescription. I pay using an electronic payment integration that's directly built into my phone. I take my prescription and I'm on my way. So good example of a company that's done a good job of integrating technology so that it's easy for their customers to accomplish what it is they want to accomplish. And integrating that with the in-person human interaction.

Sounds like one of those bada-bing bada-boom moments for you. The way that it's supposed to. Normally, yeah, normally anytime you involve anything with healthcare or financial services or government, very rarely do you get a bada-bing bada-boom moment. So kudos to you for having a good experience with regards to prescriptions and insurance because that doesn't always happen as I'm sure you can attest.

That is very true.

Yeah, yeah, so cool. Beyond just the world of banking, I guess for those of you that maybe own a business or have managerial Responsibilities. Maybe go back to staff or think about what are the expectations that I guess you're putting on the customer or the client as to how much they should be responsible for telling you that they need or what help they want. And trying to bring an outside perspective to say, are we missing opportunities? Because, you know, what boils down to to it with the bank that we were doing strategic planning with is, you know, the focus on this was around cross-selling. They wanted more customers to use more of their services, and that involved the S-word that people typically hate, especially in the banking industry, called sales. And Wells Fargo has been in the news recently with its debacle in the sales and incentive program and how their practices kind of fostered an unethical environment where people felt they had to maybe sell things that they shouldn't sell for the customer or falsify things to keep their job. So the whole sales word in, I think, all businesses tends to be a little bit of a scary thing because the thought is I got to shove something down somebody's throat that they don't want. And in the community banking space, it really revolves around, well, how can we help our customers do more and save them time, but not make it feel like it's sales orientated? And so that's where we kind of shifted our energy from what does the bank need to do to tell its employees to shift, to thinking about the customer experience. The fact that people don't have as much time as they used to. They're on their mobile devices all the time. They have multiple things going on. Dual-income families, single-parent families, kids going in multiple directions, plus the competitive threats. There's more businesses out there competing, so there's uncertainty or a challenge just from a consumer's perspective even picking the right service. And addressing those things, which kind of backhandedly introduces the concept of sales and cross-selling and multiple product services and, and product and service awareness and education, but not doing it from a sense that the employee feels like they're being forced to shift or change just for the purpose of selling or sales. So it's not an easy thing, and I'm sure, Jeff, you've seen businesses and banks in particular that have tried doing this that, you know, struggle, and employees will dig in their heels. So, you know, I guess those are some, just some kind of bigger picture observations that hopefully will spill over into the world outside of banking.

One of the things that I see, and Eric, I'm interested in your comments on this, is—

Yeah.

And I'm going to use an example from banking, but I don't think it's unique to banking. And that is how organizations have a perception of who their customers are. But if I press them and have them use good analytical tools, information that they have available, and really dig in and see who their customers are, they very often are surprised. They're not who they think they are.

Absolutely.

And then to take that one step further, when I press them to— if I ask them, who are your profitable customers, the answer is rarely what the results are when we apply some analytics and look at who the profitable customers are. And that is information I think that's valuable in any business.

Oh yeah. And, you know, I think most people either listening live or on the recording are familiar with the whole Pareto principle, you know, the 80/20 rule. But, you know, 80% of your profit is going to come from 20% of your customers. 80% of X is going to come from 20% of Y. It's been proven time and time again. And in the banking industry, because there is so much data that we collect on customers as part of the transaction process, if you've ever applied for a mortgage loan, you know, other than going to a doctor for a physical, you pretty much reveal more of yourself on a mortgage application than at any other point in the history of your lifetime. And so there's a lot of data that an institution— which is why trust and security and privacy is so important— there's a lot of data that institutions have on you that can be used, if done properly, to help measure profitability. Some businesses don't get the amount of data on their customers as what we do in the financial services industry. But I will tell you, time and time again, when a financial institution gets in and looks at its profitability numbers, It sometimes is even closer to 90/10, where 90% of the profit that an organization like a bank or a credit union is generating comes from 10% of its customers, a very, very small segment. And there's a good swath of their customers or members that they're breaking even on. They're not making a ton of money, but they're not losing money. And what surprises most institutions is the number of relationships that they have that are actually costing them money. And they're in an unprofitable product, they are paying too low of a rate or too high of a rate, it's not the right fit, or the institution hasn't taken the time to, to get some other profitable relationships in the household. And You know, that I guess as you look at a plan moving forward is another validator as to why kind of taking a holistic approach at the customer experience and going back to your universal— I'll say universal employee as opposed to just universal banker, but training your employees to understand all the opportunities that you can serve your clients with, to be able to take that unprofitable segment and at least get them to break even. Because if you can save money that you're losing, that's almost like revenue. And then if you can even take it further and take an unprofitable customer and make them a profitable customer because they're going to use some services through you that they're probably using somewhere else, you just haven't taken the time to invite them to use them with you. You're basically doubling the revenue potential for that customer because instead of losing $20 a month, You're earning $20 a month, which means the benefit to the organization is $40 a month, right to the bottom line. And it could be $400, it could be $4,000. But yeah, very rarely does an organization really know its customers at the profitability level. You may think because, you know, Jeff comes into the bank every day and he's got a good balance in his checking account that we're making a lot of money on him because he's one of our best customers. But if all Jeff does is write a lot of checks and take time at the teller line cashing things, Jeff may not be the most profitable customer, or, you know, you just don't know. So profitability is a, is a very important component to wrap into this big overall equation. I just don't know how easy it is for other organizations outside of the world of banking to do it, but put it on your list because it's something that you should be taking to PCAP.

One of the points that you made, and I know you and I have both had this experience at one time or another, and that is often customers that we have an outstanding relationship with do business with other companies to accomplish something that we can do for them because we didn't tell them.

Right. Yep.

Do you have any stories you want to share on that?

Unfortunately, I do, and I trust I'm not the only one sharing this. You know, one of my challenges, and I'm sure a lot of businesses feel this way as well, and it's my, I guess, issue to get over. We do a lot of stuff at WSI, and we are fortunate to work with a lot of great organizations And we typically start that relationship with building a website, and that's usually where the need is, so that's the solution that we provide. And we build a website and an easy-to-use content management system that the organization can update. I try not to over— because I know the world of digital marketing can be rather confusing, so I try not to like jump right in and go, okay, Jeff, now that we got your website done, let's talk about search engine optimization and off-page link building, and oh, by the way, are you using digital marketing and paid search, and what about remarketing and tracking pixels? Have you heard of marketing automation? What about mobile in-app banner ads? You know, you can very quickly overwhelm a customer, and, you know, they're like, oh my gosh, all I wanted was a website, seriously? So, I'm very sensitive to that. I had a conversation about 6 months ago with a client that called and said, hey, I need, you know, X and such done for my website, which gave me an indication that they were going to be moving forward doing some advertising with, you know, a digital advertising agency. And I reached back to them and I said, you know, we can do that, but why didn't you ask us to do that. And he said, Eric, I didn't even know you did that. And so I'm having conversations with clients now almost making fun of the fact that, you know, Jeff, if you were my client, you know, hey Jeff, you know we built your website, you think of me for that. There are instances where we've actually had other clients move forward with services that we also offer because they didn't know I did it. I don't want to choke you with information, and I don't want to overload you, but some of these other things, I just want to make sure you know we do them. If it comes up as part of your discussions, or if these are things that you think you may want to investigate, I would love an opportunity to at least talk to you about them. It doesn't mean you have to go with me to use them, but you should know that we do these services. If I can save you time, Because I do the website and I can put on the tracking code and we already have all of your graphical standards so we could do banner advertising and promotional, then, then, you know, it might make sense for us to kind of bundle this and I can give you some better pricing than maybe what somebody from the outside does because we already have a relationship. And I just leave it at that, and that's the extent of the conversation I'm having to not feel like I have to inundate them with everything that we do, but at least making sure that they know we do way more than just build websites. And that's been a mental shift for me. It's one of those do as I say, not as I do, up until recently, where now I'm starting to do that. So for any of you that might be clients of ours that I haven't had the opportunity to have that conversation with, keep that in mind. So we'll maybe let that be a distribution source But, you know, trying to make an effort to make sure, because our industry changes, you know, just so frequently, that it is a little bit of a challenge in the day-to-day. What is the best way to reach a customer and make sure that they know that there are other things? I mean, I had the same issue when I was at the bank where somebody would come in and They'd want advice. Well, we do financial planning. I had no idea, and we had been doing financial planning for 2 and a half years. I know it happens all over the place. We just need to make an effort to remember that it's important we share that because my client, when we had that conversation, justly so, He was somewhat critical and said, you know, it would have been nice to have known that because now I had to go through and pick somebody else and I've got to start a new relationship and I just signed a 6-month agreement. Um, you know, and, and he was kind of pissed that he didn't know that I did that and I don't blame him. So, so there's your story. Aren't you glad you asked? A little sensitive.

I want to illustrate some of the points you made with a story of my own. I bought a house in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1999. The house was built in 1963 and it was due for a new roof. I had been driving around for 30-some years and never really paid attention to the roofs on houses as I drove through. Well, when I suddenly had a need for a new roof. You know, up until that point, I hadn't given a crap about roofs. But when I drove around, what did I notice? The different types of roofs that were on houses. Did that type of roof tend to have mold or staining on it more often? And I gained this great new fascination for roofing. My point here is there are some companies that do this very well. Now, I'm not one that is offended by being part of appropriate drip campaigns from companies that I do business with. So, you know, once or twice a week, I get an email from Well, Fresh Market. It's a, it's kind of a boutique-type grocery store that's in the markets that I live in. Certainly, probably everybody on this call are part of drip campaigns from Amazon.com, and the reason I tied drip of a way that you can for people that are not offended by it, you can just drop in some quick short emails, not in a salesy way, but more in an informational way of offerings of products and services that you have. And when that, when that prospect or customer, when that product or service might come up on their radar, like the roof did for me, by using some sort of drip campaign or some sort of drip program, they become very sensitive and notice, and that's a pretty good way. Eric, can you help us out with some stories of how you've tied that into a digital campaign?

One of the newer technologies, and I think you were absent for this show, but one of the newer technologies that we talked an awful lot about during our global convention in Toronto a few weeks ago Was the concept of marketing automation and how the technology exists. And this is another item that we put on our strategic discussion list for yesterday's planning session, is how that can be integrated into a process through your website or as part of an onboarding process where, you know, in your example, you know, somebody builds a house, they do a roof. They have a good idea about when a roof is going to expire, or maybe after a hailstorm or wind damage, but they use their database to track and identify people that might be likely candidates for follow-up, or they automate the process where I'm somebody that's interested in buying a home for the first time. I visit my bank or my credit union. I sign up for a series of emails that can educate me on the things I need to know as a first-time homeowner, or as a business owner seeking to expand or needing commercial financing, or somebody that's interested in protecting my identity online when I use things like online banking and mobile payments. Whatever the case is, the workload that it requires the business upfront to do is you have to think about that process before it happens. So I need to think about when would somebody want a roof and put a process in place that will happen when that activity occurs, whether it's in 15 years, whether it's after a hailstorm, when somebody is interested in knowing what it takes to be a homeowner for the first time. I have to think about what pieces of information that likely millennial, who likely is either renting or living with mom and dad, who maybe has not been employed for very long, whatever the case, I have to think about what's going on in their mind, what their questions are, what sort of information I can give them that will educate them, not try to sell them a mortgage, but educate them and provide them with information. Because if I can position that as a trusted piece of information, that's going to build my relationship and my credibility with them, and it's going to increase the likelihood that they're going to touch base and want to do business with me. And, and so the whole concept around marketing automation is one that I am having conversations with every single one of my customers on, because it's a technology that in our industry isn't really well known, but it is so, so unbelievably powerful. The one example that jumps into my head right now, a bank that we work with here in Michigan does little community events, and they'll do little informational seminars where they'll invite a guest speaker to come in and talk about a topic of interest. And as part of that process, they give people the ability to put their name and email address on a signup form to get a copy of the slide presentation or a follow-up message. What they were doing was they were putting all that information and typing it into an Excel sheet. They were taking the Excel sheet and they were emailing it to their loan officers or their branch managers. They had created a series of Word documents with templates, so the day after the event, send them this email. Next week, send them this email. So they had the process all thought out, but what they were finding was the employees, even though they knew the process, the employees would come back and say, well, I just don't have time for that. And that's one of the really cool parts about marketing automation is you could build that into a system. You could put the person into the workflow and it automatically triggers. So now just the branch manager The email goes out to his 5 connections automatically that appear like they're coming from Jeff. And then if I'm one of the recipients and I want to follow up with Jeff and have a conversation because I'm talking about switching banks or adding another product or service, or I want to turn on something, I then respond back to Jeff. And all the loan officer or the branch manager needs to do is now look for responses and engagement, as opposed to having to remember to Copy, paste, email, format, deliver. You can automate a lot of that stuff now, but it requires a little work on the front end. This bank had already thought through everything. They were just missing the automation part, and they were super excited. And I'm so glad I had that conversation, um, because this is going to save them a tremendous amount of time and actually get those messages out to those people that have asked for that information.

You make a really good point that underscores to me, I can think of very, very few businesses that have a need to interact with customers and prospects personally that don't have a need for some type of customer relationship or CRM product.

Right.

I'll illustrate that with a short story from yesterday. I went to see a dermatologist yesterday, and first time I had been to this medical practice. I'm sitting in the office, and it looked like they had a pretty good business. Well, a gentleman came in and said, someone called me from here yesterday. I was in my car. And, uh, he said they had some sort of question about insurance. And because I was driving, I wasn't able to write down the person's name or what it was they wanted, but I just was in the area and I thought I'd stop by and take care of it. They had no clue what he was talking about. Um, literally, it was like watching the Three Stooges in their customer service area. There was a lobby full of clients or patients, whichever you prefer to call them, that watched this group of people in this medical practice. They didn't have a clue. They had to guess and assume and things like that. And I was thinking as I was sitting there, there's just no excuse for this. If they had a customer— if they had a CRM, a customer relationship manager software, the person That made that call should have made some notes, and this should be a thirty-second interaction that could have been resolved and been a very positive customer service experience. That it just didn't work out like that for them.

Yeah, I'm I'm hearing the Benny Hill music in the background as you're talking.

It looks a lot like that as well.

See all the employees. screwing around trying to figure out what to do and who said what and all that jazz. So at the risk of making it sound like I'm being self-serving, I did want to pull up a blog post that I recently wrote. I also pushed it out to LinkedIn as an update as well and did a post on it. But as we're talking about marketing automation and being able to identify opportunities and present an opportunity to engage and interact, I wrote this article called I'm No Chicken Farmer, But If I Was.

We were—

and I'll give you kind of the rundown, but it almost kind of reinforces the point here. We were looking at examples of banks that are in the agricultural arena with another one of our clients last week, and we ended up over at Live Oak Bank. They've got a really cool website. We don't do their website. I have no affiliation with Live Oak Bank, I'm just using them as an example. But we went over to Live Oak Bank and we spent some time looking in their agricultural section of their website, looking at their loan officer profiles, because the client that we're working with wanted to have something similar to that and they thought Live Oak had a good example. What I thought was interesting, I actually got to capture the entire process of this lead gen tracking information marketing automation process. So a couple days later, I was on Facebook browsing around, and lo and behold, I saw an advertisement that was sponsored from Live Oak Bank. It thought that I was interested in farming and presented me with an opportunity to download their grower's guide, thinking I might be a chicken farmer. And I'm not a chicken farmer, but if I were, I probably would be interested in Live Oak Bank. I went through the process. I clicked on the actual download link. They weren't selling me chicken farmer financing or a checking account for chicken farmers. It was, check out our guide. We've got a lot of expertise in the area and let us just help you kind of think of some things if you're thinking about a chicken farm. So then I started in the process of marketing automation. I identified myself by filling out the form on their website. Their website had a picture of some chicken farmer customers to help create some familiarity and comfortability that there are other people out there that use them to farm chickens, and these guys certainly look like farmers. And then after I filled out my information, I had an opportunity to download their guide, and I now have 8 pages of really cool information. If I ever decide to start a chicken farm, I've got some info that I didn't have before. But now I'm in their database. Now I can get other information. And if I were a chicken farmer or I did reside in their area and I gave them my information, they could assign me to a particular loan officer. I could have gotten a phone call. I could, you know, so there's a lot of different ways that that follow-up— and it's like Fresh Market or any of the other examples that you can think of. Now I've identified myself as somebody that's interested. They don't— maybe they know I live in Michigan, but maybe my parents live in their market area. Maybe I'm part of a family business. Maybe I'm looking to move and start a chicken farm. So none of those questions are really known at this point. But it was cool that I got to see this on the consumer side, and because I knew what was going on, I was able to capture and track it as an educational piece for our customers. It was really cool to see marketing automation in the wild and how the lead generation process actually works to try to keep in touch and make sure that when the decision comes up to start a chicken farm, at least Live Oak Bank is going to be on my radar screen. Full disclosure, I have no interest in being a chicken farmer. As cute as those little chickens are, I'll give you that. But yeah, I'm not going to be a chicken farmer, so don't worry about that.

So we started our discussion and we talked a good bit about millennials and interacting with millennials. One of the things that Jason Dorsey pointed out, and he actually, he does, he's involved with, operates a company that does research. One of the things he pointed out is that many of the things that baby boomers did earlier in their lives— so let's say in their 20s, perhaps they graduated high school at 18, spent 4 years going to school, and then started a family when they were in their early 20s— it's not that millennials are not doing those things. It's just that they're doing them later in life. The other thing is college debt, which is a very real thing, is delaying when many millennials do things. So even though it's probably less common that someone will finish college in 4 years today, even if they do, they probably are going to chunk away at some of the debt from college for those— the majority— that have debt before they start doing things like starting a family, buying their first homes, and those types of things. So we've probably shifted many of the things that for baby boomers started in their 20s have probably been shifted at least a decade further into life for millennials.

Cool. Well, Jeffrey, this has been an awesome conversation. And I, uh, I knew we were going to chat, and we didn't get a lot of opportunity to talk before the show about your CSI stuff, but as I alluded to in the rundown, uh, buckle your seatbelts. You never know exactly where we're going to go when you give us both a microphone. Um, and hopefully beyond just the world of banking, we've been able to give people some things to think about as it relates to generational differences, expectations of your customers. We talked about profitability. Technology, automating some things. The only downside is I had all sorts of cool information that I wanted to share about If This Then That and Microsoft's new service and Zapier and we're not going to have any time. I think we've got to write it for next week's show. Sounds like it. Cool. We're not going to have time to start Any new topics? So I think my vote is let's go ahead and start putting a bow on this. Anything in closing that you would like to offer?

I'd like to second that. Cool. Good. All in favor say aye. Aye.

All in favor say aye. And again, we've successfully navigated today's show as a politically free zone. So that is a very good thing. But this has been a great conversation and some good stuff, Jeff. I really enjoyed chatting with you, and hopefully our audience got some good nuggets as a takeaway. So I'll look forward to getting this online and tweeting it out, and hopefully other people can enjoy it, because I think there's some, some really good little jewels in here that businesses can use.

Alright. Thanks a lot, Eric. Have a great day, and everybody that's in our audience, have a great day as well. Thanks for attending Free Webinar Wednesdays.

Excellent. We'll see everybody next week. Take care.

Bye-bye.