A Comparison of Financial Institutions

Today I had the good fortune (perhaps misfortune is a more appropriate term) to experience first-hand a textbook example case of good customer service versus bad customer service and its effect in the business-customer relationship. It could very easily have come right out of a management case study... 




 As luck would have it, this experience dealt with financial institutions. The comparison was lateral in the sense that I was making a similar-sized deposit to my own account at each bank. By the rules of common sense, the experience should have been perfectly equal. In reality, however, the service I received was anything but comparable.




One of the players in this case is new to my locale, but advertises itself as "The Hometown Bank" with "Over a hundred years of experience in the New York Area.” The other, a much larger conglomerate who dominates the financial landscape, has an unfortunate acronym that also happens to be a type of serpent which constricts life out of its victims.





EXHIBIT A:




I first arrived at the trusty “Hometown Bank,” mainly because it was closest to my point of departure. Their facilities greeted me with a big, spacious parking lot and easy access to the door. Their establishment was nothing fancy, just open and easy. When I walked in, there was a nicely dressed gentleman behind the desk who greeted me. The teller greeted me and welcomed me back (noting that I had not been there in a while), even though it was only the second time I had been to that branch (the first was when I opened that particular account). I made my deposit and she commented on my shirt (nothing special, just a standard designer white button-up).

I asked her if she could write down my account number because my deposit slips were "starter" slips with spaces to write in the relevant account information, which- true to my nature- I had misplaced somewhere and did not know. Instead, she took a stack of slips, went over to some kind of bank machine and fed them into it one-by-one... then came back and gave me a freshly minted stack of deposit slips with all my information printed neatly on their face.