Shut the Barn Door

I recently met with two banks that had very impressive sales results – opening nearly twice as many new accounts per branch as peers. But when looking further at their total program, account growth was no better than our benchmarked average. Simply put, high attrition offset most of the impressive sales gains.

It’s not how many new accounts you book, but how many you turn into long term profitable relationships.

Some thoughts to ponder:

• You need to pay as much attention to account retention as you do to customer acquisition. In the retail bank, retention programs often don’t get the attention and focus they deserve when compared to front end sales efforts, marketing acquisition programs, and the like.
• The impact is huge. Think about the effect on revenue, core deposit Cost of Funds, and marketing expense if you can simply retain a higher percentage of your customers.
• You need to know the numbers. What is a good acquisition and retention rate? How do your metrics compare to peers? How do they compare to top quartile performers?
• You need to know what the best practices are, and assess which ones have the highest impact for your organization. Improving sales process by correctly profiling customers and placing them in the right product for their needs? Ensuring structured on-boarding processes are implemented? Cross-selling “sticky” products? Implementing attrition prediction models, backed-up with targeted retention campaigns? Reducing problem incidence and increasing overall satisfaction rates?

In the end, account churn is very costly – but it is also relatively inexpensive to control. We can help — we have benchmarks, best practices, and proven results. Give us a call.

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Need expert help improving revenue from your consumer and business customers? Peak Performance Consulting Group has best practices and unique solutions, with a proven track record of success helping clients achieve industry leading results. Contact us
- our experts can help you unlock the key to additional profitability and efficiency.