Keep your clients up-to-date on everything your financial institution is doing to support them, the community, and your staff during these chaotic times. Open and regular communication with your clients is key right now, but there are a lot of different things to communicate and it can be hard to prioritize and plan for every single one of them.
To be frank, unless you’re in the marketing department or branch staff, communicating with your clients is probably not your number one priority. And if you are in marketing or branch staff, it’s all you think about. Either way, that’s why we’ve created this list of the top types of communication you should be focused on.
COVID-19 is impacting every single business around the world; no industry is protected, not even the banking industry. You may be an essential business, but that doesn’t mean you won’t experience a financial impact from this pandemic. In fact, just a few weeks ago on April 4, 2020, MarketWatch announced that a small bank in West Virginia had become the first institution to fail during the Coronavirus crisis.
Your branch traffic has come to a screeching halt with the COVID-19 pandemic, but that doesn’t mean your initiatives need to. You know those projects you have been putting off? Like those branch transformation projects that just seemed too inconvenient before? Now is a perfect time to quickly and efficiently make the changes you’ve been thinking about, without affecting business hours, branch operations, or even your staff’s ability to assist and advise clients. In fact, almost every traditional obstacle to branch transformation has been removed, which means you can start and complete your projects at the speed of light—and with a lot less cost involved too!
There is no doubt your inbox is flooded with emails on how the businesses you subscribe to and visit are planning on handling the COVID-19 crisis, including what they will be doing to keep your needs/desires met, how they are aiding their staff, and what they are doing to support the community they serve and even the economy as a whole.
If they are in your inbox, they are definitely in your client’s. And because of this, more than ever before, clients are recognizing the impact businesses can have on not only the economy but also on the personal lives of those in the communities around them. The expectations for your financial institution to be involved in the community have never been higher and they will remain there until long after COVID-19 passes.
With the Coronavirus making its way around the world, everything is either shutting down or finding new ways to operate. And as an essential business, your financial institution is being pushed to the limits. You are certainly running 1,000 mph and it can be hard to imagine starting a new project or focusing on anything but the current situation at hand. We get it.
That’s why instead of focusing on what changes can be made today (which we did in our last blog), we’re covering a few ways you can plan to change your branch for the future—for the post-COVID-19 era of client expectations.
Just about everyone is shutting down to help stop the spread of the novel COVID-19. It's great to see the nation work together to try and contain this epidemic, but the effort is not going to be easy. Retail establishments are feeling the turbulence of this pandemic—including banks and credit unions. And financial institutions know better than anyone, with cultural turbulence like this, the economy will feel the same waves roll through it. As everyone does their part in trying to contain the spread of the virus, it is crucial for the economy that business continuity is upheld safely.
Thankfully, technology has made it easier than ever to maintain somewhat normal routines. Video conferencing, VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), and cloud-based software all make it possible for most office jobs to continue. Which got us thinking...how can banks and credit unions take their virtual client experience to the next level? So when this pandemic is over, we can
