Checks and Balances

In fact, things weren’t as bleak for Deluxe as that drop implied. The company had already planted the seeds for its transformation in 2003 by launching a series of programs that Lu Widener, the company’s senior vice president and chief sales and marketing officer, calls “the most innovative thing we do.”

These programs consist of “collaboratives,” which gather together a group of bank and business clients to identify, research, and solve an industry-wide problem; and “expos,” where the results of the collaboratives are shared with a broader group of Deluxe clients.

Deluxe launched its first collaborative in 2003. The company invited 12 to 15 banking executives to participate in a one-year study, whose purpose was to investigate an industry-wide problem: why so many bank customers leave their banks during the first 90 days. Each executive had to commit to five weeklong meetings, then share the results at the subsequent expo.

Deluxe spent the next year gathering data about early attrition. Out of that research, Deluxe developed the “Welcome Home Tool Kit,” a prescriptive kit to help banks reduce early attrition rates by customizing the printed materials that they send out to their customers. The Welcome Home kit also includes materials to help bank employees improve their communications skills with customers. Banks that purchase the kit can also hire Deluxe to carry out parts of the kit’s “prescription.” For instance, Deluxe could write, print, and mail welcome letters to new customers on the bank’s letterhead, or it could use its call centers to field calls aimed at helping the bank’s customers learn more about the bank’s services and products.

Deluxe planned its 2005 collaborative around the relationship between small businesses and banks, and chose bank participants from a growing waiting list. Banks recognized that they were not as effective at understanding the needs of their small business customers. As part of the collaborative, Deluxe facilitated several meetings between banks and small-business owners to discover those businesses’ unmet needs. “Quite frankly, they don’t like their banks,” Widener says, citing complaints that banks care more making loans and selling products rather than their clients’ success.

In developing ways to help banks generate customer loyalty by smoothing their relationship with small businesses, Deluxe hopes to create loyal customers that will buy customized products and services. So far, the strategy seems to be working.

“The expos are first-class, top-notch, awesome opportunities for bankers to come together and for us to see how committed Deluxe is to us,” says Jeanine Sandberg, financial officer at The RiverBank in Osceola, Wisconsin, and a member of Deluxe’s third and current collaborative, which deals with problem resolution. “It brings together a group of people that might otherwise be competitive and it allows us to put the competitiveness behind and learn from one another.”