Jaime Torchiana, M.S.

In today’s rapidly evolving customer banking landscape, staying ahead of the curve is paramount. Within increased competition, a decline in customer retention, expanding regulation, and a new wave of digital native customers with heightened expectations, the quest for the coveted “trusted advisor“ status has never been more challenging. To set goals, stakeholders must ask themselves, “What business outcomes are necessary to drive results? Which roles are most critical to producing these? Who does this the best? What are their best practices in achieving extraordinary results? What are their measures of success?” By reverse engineering this process, starting with business results, you can create specific, measurable and role-contextual goals

Within every financial institution, there exists a select few who excel in building deeper, more valuable, client relationships leading to higher assets under management, stronger portfolio growth, and reduced loan default. How do these top performers consistently outshine their peers? In our experience, the fastest way to drive performance and upskill good team members is to close the performance gap by capturing the hidden insights and repeatable practices of your stars. Tapping into top performers can inform onboarding, training, performance management, and career development strategies, while also delivering tangible improvements in key business metrics. Training and “skills” for skills-sake is not adequate in this dynamic environment.

Sometimes, cross-functional teams can come together to drive the success of a particular event or goal (a product launch, a merger or acquisition, etc.) and it's always important to assess and address any cultural differences that may be inherent to the various departments. An open discussion about communication norms, ways of working, etc. upfront can go a long way to establishing the culture for the new working group and ensure alignment of its members.

When studying the performance of our client's winning teams (and this could be deal teams, competitive bid teams, management or executive teams, etc.), we look at the collective output of the team that is valuable to the business. Reverse-engineering the process, we then look at the attributes and synergies individual team members bring the team so we can replicate that across the organization. It's important to remember that an All-Star Team is not necessarily a team of all stars.

Measuring outcomes are key. In our client work, technical support engineers looked at the following: - NPS (net promotor score) - customer issue resolved on time/first time - consumption (client increasing use of product, or expanding product lines) - all cases managed to resolution - high quality and clear customer communications (helped by the use of best practice templates) - customer requested specific salesperson/technical support - unsolicited customer feedback - smooth handoffs between team members, if required (projecting image of "one company.")

In our work with a top electronic signature software's technical support and sales team, the trusted technical advisor relationship, built upon strong communication and active listening, contributed to higher c-satisfaction and increased produce consumption. Video calls were key to pick up on non-verbal reactions and probe for "the question behind the question," listening for the business impact to help determine severity and urgency. Listening to, and advocating for, customer-suggested enhancements also went a long way to customer success.