Umpqua Bank Decided to Support People’s Lives, Not Execute Banking Tasks.
Umpqua Bank is committed to delivering an experience customized for each customer. Steve May, Umpqua’s executive vice president of “cultural enhancement,” has a goal that everybody in every store is able to do every task. Umpqua wants a teller who can take a mortgage application and a loan officer who is pleased to help with a safety deposit box. Beyond the banking experience, Umpqua believes in customizing experiences by community. The company leaves it to the managers in each community bank to customize their offerings based on their customers and their interests—from yoga classes in one “store” location (they don’t use the word “branch”) to movie nights or a knitting club in another. Each has its own fund to enable it to customize the experience based on the lives of the customers in its community.
Make Umpqua a Community Destination.
Umpqua’s mission is to become a destination for customers. By offering a warm environment customized by community interests and a banking experience personalized to every customer who walks through their doors, it wants customers to think of the Umpqua bank in their community as their store, their gathering place. An unexpected place where they can go to listen to music and have a cup of coffee, or take a yoga class! Umpqua stores should feel more like a neighborhood gathering place than a bank.
Staff Turnover Is Half the Banking Industry Average.
As Umpqua changed its approach from a traditional “banking”-style service to a customized experience for each customer, employees had to learn to juggle many duties. It meant more work initially, but now they can’t imagine being limited to the individual tasks their jobs were defined as previously. As Umpqua has grown from 6 to 184 stores, with staff increases from 350 to 2,154, it has retained its focus on the customer and the values that built the bank. And the company has retained its employees. Umpqua’s voluntary employee turnover rate is just 8 percent, compared to the banking industry rate of about 40 percent. In 2011, as a testament that this change in focus was not only good for customers but also great for employees, the company made, for the fifth year in a row, Fortune magazine’s list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.”
How good are the jugglers in your business? Does your environment embrace and welcome customers? How can you make a visit to your business a welcome oasis during your customer’s day? Do Customers Look Forward to Seeing You? “Umpqua Bank is part Internet café, part community center, and part bank. The coffee’s good and it’s not a bad place to sit and read a book.” Umpqua’s goal was to make walking into their bank something people look forward to.
- Are your operating decisions based on executing tasks? Or delivering an experience that complements your customers’ day?
- Does your front line have the freedom to customize experiences for customers?
- How would you rate your ability to make customers look forward to seeing you, to interacting with your people?
- Do customers rave about how you customize the experience for them?
- Do your decisions for delivering an experience earn you “beloved” status today?