Better Late Than Never

Welcome to the 108th edition of “In Touch”. As always, I would love to continue the conversation so please hit reply and let me know what you think.

Story of the Week: “Better Late Than Never"

I have been a customer of the same bank for over 20 and it has always been virtually impossible to foster any kind of personal connection with anyone there. Most of my calls went unanswered, emails seemed to vanish and meetings were non-existent. Over the past two decades, I had come to accept that personal relationships between banks and their customers were truly a thing of the distant past.

But suddenly things changed! Out of the blue I was recently contacted not by one but by three friendly women, representatives of my bank. What’s more, they were not trying to sell me a new product or discuss interest rates. They wanted to meet me in person and to show that they valued me as an individual and as a company client. As you can imagine, I was surprised but delighted to arrange a meeting.

It turned out that that they had been following my work in training and development and had concluded that I was correct in believing (and teaching) that in business – including banking – relationships and not numbers are what matter most.

To their credit, they didn’t just talk about relationships but demonstrated their genuine belief in creating and maintaining them by handing me their business cards, to which they had each added their personal mobile phone numbers. “Call us anytime,” they said. Thirty years ago, that might have been considered a very small gesture but, in today’s era when banks have thousands more customers, it struck me as quite a powerful one.

This welcome change of approach wasn’t about banking. It was about trust, personal connections and the recognition that business is built on people, not policies or technology.

A Chinese proverb wisely advises, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now." My bank may not have understood the value of personal relationships when I opened my account in 2005 but today it clearly recognizes that, for all the positive aspects of technology and digital transformation, many customers – myself included – greatly appreciate and desire person-to-person contact. Better late than never!

Words of Wisdom

“Memorable customer service can only take place in a human-to-human situation.” Jeffrey Gitomer

“We are not in the coffee business serving people, we are in the people business serving coffee.” Howard Schultz (former CEO, Starbucks)

A Question to Ponder, dear friend.

As a customer, how important is it for you to have a personal relationship with a business? As a businessperson, how important is it for you to have a personal relationship with your clients/customers?