Smile Like You Mean It, Bank Branches

With bank branches increasingly losing out on floor traffic, there’s something bankers should keep in mind when thinking about extracting the most revenue from their physical footprints: Don’t look scary (physically) or you will lose out on sales from those customers whom are still taking the time to come into your branches.

“People are intimidated by banks,” Alan Depencier, Royal Bank of Canada‘s head of marketing services and transformation, tells Bank Innovation. “It’s about communicating the various ways to help.”

With that in mind, the institution headquartered in Toronto made a move to make its branch customers feel at ease by unveiling its new “retail stores” in 2011.

That transformation meant, among other things, ensuring tellers were no longer hidden behind desks as well as deploying Microsoft Surface technology throughout its branches to help consumers interact with their finances in a more fun, visual and tactile way. Take its “drop a coin” app, for example. When a patron drops a coin virtually on a screen, the app starts to run to show a consumer how much he saves when using a RBC tax free savings account versus a standard one over time.

To date, RBC boasts 32 retail stores across Canada. By 2012’s end, it will operate 50.

The focus on making the branch less intimidating is to foster an environment where customers are more willing to express what they need from the institution. “Clients have many questions and needs on their minds, but they aren’t always comfortable,” Depencier tells Bank Innovation. “We want to create an environment that serves as a catalyst for consumers to share what’s on their minds.”

This is especially important as customers coming to branches are looking for a more extensive sort of banking “help.”

“It’s an important channel that people choose when they want to connect with experts,” Depencier says. “Branches are still a critical channel for RBC Bank.”

RBC’s stance points to a trend that Depencier identifies as taking place within the industry at large:  FIs are channeling their inner retailers. Umpqua Bank, for example, has been a known leader in innovating the branch space for years, and Huntington Bank has been recently equipping branch bankers with tablets to improve the physical banking experience.

But fine-tuning one channel only underscores the main problem plaguing FIs nationwide:  Striving to figure out how to exist within an omnichannel world.

“As an industry, we have to be comfortable in an omnichannel world but also use the uniqueness of the channel,” Depencier says.