The Path Ahead Featuring Marquis’ CEO, Susan R. Faulkner

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The Path Ahead

Susan R. Faulkner, CEO, Marquis

Are you ready for this next normal?

The unknown portion of this crisis may be beyond anything we’ve seen in our professional lives. But we need to do our best to find out what the issues are and then help navigate through them. The point isn’t to have a better answer. The point is to build the capability to learn quickly and pivot faster than your peers do. Resilience comes through speed. This may be a new capability that very few organizations have now and they will likely need to spend real time building.

There are still a lot of unknowns, but creating value and finding those pockets of growth are possible and absolutely essential. But it will also require an understanding your customers’ and members’ needs, behaviors and concerns and to quickly adapt to these consumers and market changes. This path ahead will require resilience. There will be continued ups and downs as lockdowns are relaxed and segments of the community continue to reopen; viral resurgences and unforeseen events will keep growth from being that straight line going up.

The reality is that most business leaders made choices over the past decades that traded resilience for a perceived increase in shareholder value. Now may be the moment to consider the error of chipping away at organization resilience in the name of greater efficiency may have reached its limits. Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t efficiencies to be sought or found. But more the tradeoff between efficiencies and resiliency needs to be defined far more clearly than it has been in recent years.

Innovation may have never been so important. Now, it’s always been essential to have innovation to solve big problems. But the world is looking not just for new shiny things, but also for new ways of doing things, especially on the people side, where we need new behaviors, long term rather than short term capabilities and work ethics. More than ever, a bias to take action is essential, which will frequently mean getting comfortable with the uncomfortable. Apart from all the operational focus needed for the return to work, it is even more important that teams take a step back to reflect upon these core themes.

Are you ready to set yourself apart?

How would you grade yourself on the ability to adapt quickly and respond to changing industry needs, innovation and destabilization? This ability to adjust or shift makes an employee nimble, and that’s important because most industries, including ours, are in a state of flux. Next, are you ready to be proactive? Doing those things that you need to do before you need to do them? Having the ability to help control a situation by causing something to happen, rather than responding to it after it’s happened?

For example, reaching out to your customers and members before they’re reaching out to you in distress and being agile to move quickly and easily. An agile company or team has the ability to quickly adapt to market changes. While yesterday compliance with TRID was a primary focus, now privacy has to be the focus given the sheer amount of remote workers. Risk and concerns definitely pivoted overnight, and we had to be agile to meet most of those heightened new risks.

Next is resilience — it’s knowing how to cope in spite of setbacks, barriers or limited resources. A measure of how much you want something and how much you’re willing and able to overcome those obstacles to get it. It really has to do with the emotional strength of you, your team and your company. And finally, take action. You have to act in order to get a desired result.

What will set you apart? Ask yourself: are you positioned to lead and pivot to a more sustainable business model as we move to our next normal?

At Marquis, we have the solutions and implementation teams to help set yourself apart. But our solutions and products only tell part of that story. It is our team who work tirelessly every day to bring you the very best in data assembly, analysis and action. We believe that if we take care of our clients and take care of each other, the rest will take care of itself.

CUNA News Article – Marquis Sponsored: CRM Is Your Common Bond

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Credit unions were created to serve a common bond—not for profit, but for service. The common bond has now shifted from a shared work or education experience into a broader relationship with members and communities. The mission of people helping people remains unchanged but how it is realized has evolved.

Check out the CUNA News Article sponsored by Marquis as Ryan Housefield, SVP, Sales Executive, explains how member circumstances are unique and require personalized service.

Click here to read the full article.

Connecting Sales, Marketing and the Front Line

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Connecting Sales, Marketing and the Front Line – Move from Transactions to Relationships

Ryan Housefield, SVP, Sales Executive, Marquis

I’m a nice customer. You all know me. I’m the one who never complains, no matter what kind of service I get. I’ll go into a restaurant and sit quietly while the waiters and waitresses gossip and never bother to ask if anyone has taken my order. But I don’t complain. I just wait.

And when I go to a store to buy something, I don’t throw my weight around. I try to be thoughtful of the other person. If a snooty salesperson gets upset because I want to look at several things before making up my mind, I’m just as polite as can be. I don’t believe rudeness in return is the answer. I think that’s uncalled for.

No, I’m the nice customer. And I’ll tell you who else I am.

I’m the customer who never comes back.

Why they leave.

So, what are the stats on customers that never come back? Granted, 3% do move from the area, 5% do have relationships and partnerships somewhere else, only 9% find your competitor more appealing, and 15% have an issue with some facet of your product or service. But here’s the thing: the balance, the lion’s share – 68% – leave simply due to an attitude of indifference towards their business with you. Accenture said the same thing. It’s not about price. It’s about customer service, or lack thereof. And again, this is not necessarily about bad customer service. It’s much more subtle than that. So, let’s explore why and the opportunity some of that presents.

According to Bain, reducing attrition by just 5% can increase your profits up to 95%. That impact is all realized when you’re not spending your resources and spinning your wheels trying to replace the customers you’ve lost. Now you have a great foundation to build on and grow from.

Let’s look at another telling fact. According to Future Branches, 73% of your customers don’t know everything you offer, and would likely buy more if they did. But if your staff doesn’t know what your customers have and don’t have, both groups are in the dark. And at that point, all you can do is process a transaction.

What they expect.

Let’s recap the state of consumer expectations. First off, your customers assume you can see everything they have with you, don’t they? Based on that, they expect to be treated as a unique individual, not just another transaction. And if you know what they have, you should be able to make relevant recommendations that can help them.

Guys, your best customers expect you to know who they are. Everyone likes to be recognized. And as it was once said, “All customers are created equal. But some are simply more equal than others.” They expect you to be a trusted advisor and know what’s happening in their financial life. After all, that’s our fiduciary responsibility as a financial institution. But if we don’t record previous conversations and customer requests, it’s going to be pretty difficult to meet that expectation.

And then finally, regardless of where they engage you, they expect the left hand to know what the right hand is doing, and everyone to be on the same page. And if I was really going to boil that down, it all comes down to us honoring the relationship, taking note of what they shared with us and making it easy for the customer to do business with us.

CUNA News Podcast – Marquis Sponsored: Integrating Data to Deepen Member Relationships

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Check out the latest CUNA News Podcast sponsored by Marquis as Dr. Tony Rizzo, Chief Marketing and Creative Officer, and Ryan Housefield, Senior Vice President of Sales, describe how credit unions that use data on the front lines can provide the engagement tools employees need to drive sales and decision-making while improving the bottom line.

Click here to listen to the podcast.