Mission Impossible?

I witnessed an interesting test at a financial institution – a group of private bankers were given offers by their supervisor at 8:00AM one morning. Inside the envelopes the manager had the script and the offer details; the bankers then proceeded to call their customers and prospects regarding the offer.

The team met again at 10:30, seven bankers sat with their manager reviewing the responses to the offers. To my surprise (not theirs) each banker had been given a different deal to carry to their customers; during their time together, the team settled on three of the seven offers and modified scripts to strengthen these top offers.

The call center manager was then presented with these three tightened offers and the private bankers spent time with the call center staff training them on both the offers and the possible responses. Over the next two days, the call center pushed the offers to their prospects. I suggested incorporating email into the mix – sending a personalized offer to customers/ prospects that the call center was unable to reach by phone as well as a last chance email to those who had initially passed the offer. These emails included testimonials from prospects that accepted the offer and were streamlined to provide three succinct reasons and a single call to action.

In the end, the entire process proved very successful in customer growth, marking/ brand strengthening through multi-channel communication and (importantly for the bank) team unity – the call center even got email stats for recipients who had clicked through for one last attempt via phone.