“Banks are typically not merchants, at least from a retail perspective,” notes Kim Hale, director of strategy and account planning for John Ryan Performance, Inc., in Minneapolis. With offices in Minnesota, London, and Madrid, Hale’s company provides consulting services to banks and other financial institutions to increase customer satisfaction and the purchase of products and services.
Hale says that in order to boost their walk-in business and compete with Internet banking and other financial services companies, banks all over the world are adapting to a more inclusive, consumer-focused approach to retail. “Banks are having to focus on being more savvy,” she says. “It’s more competitive, especially with the advent of customer-driven content.”
John Ryan Performance has implemented a number of ideas for its financial services clients to make their interiors more customer oriented. These have included incorporating juice bars and Internet carrels in Dutch-based insurance firm ING’s Czech Republic customer facilities; adding self-service areas to Portugal’s Novarede banks; and de-emphasizing teller services in favor of more intimate consulting areas and higher-end services for a financial services chain in South Africa.
Perhaps John Ryan Performance’s most intriguing creation is an adaptable software system that uses flat-screen digital monitors to create ever-changing promotional messages. “There are all kinds of reasons for including digital marketing,” Hale says. She notes, for instance, that “there’s a minimum of three times increase in awareness and recall moving from a print-based message to digital based.”
The flexibility of digital platforms—the ease with which banks can change the message—allows them to be more responsive, for example, to a competitor’s rates on certificates of deposit. A bank can change its own rate in response to the competition’s and immediately put that information before its customers. A local John Ryan client, Wayzata-based TCF, uses flat-screen monitors to “broadcast” promotional items for the bank chain’s services to visiting customers.
John Ryan Performance has also helped banks interact with customers by setting up digital “listening posts”—something like a more prominent and modern version of a suggestion box—inside bank lobbies. These kiosk-like entities can solicit customer opinions for marketing purposes.
These innovations suggest that commercial bank interiors, locally and internationally, will continue to evolve into more retail directions. For John Ryan’s Minneapolis office, this involves a kind of cross-cultural effort.
“We work together very closely” with John Ryan’s European offices, Hale says. “We do a lot of sharing of information and bring in the best practices from all over.”
