How a Boston Bank Increased Conversion Rates and Wallet Share

Boston-based retail bank Belmont Savings Bank was faced with a problem that many retail banks with dispersed sales teams are facing today: a lack of accurate insight into their bankers’ call activity. For Belmont, managers’ visibility into the day-to-day activities of their reps was limited by geographically dispersed branches. Additionally, the bank’s call tracking was performed manually, leading to frequent miscalculations and inaccurate CRM data.

What Belmont needed was an improved sales effectiveness strategy based on real, accurate data. However, they needed to first collect call activity data before they could analyze it.

The Challenge

Belmont Savings was looking to increase branch foot traffic, share-of-wallet and customer loyalty. Overall, they wanted to improve their management efficiencies and use data to their advantage to improve their conversion rates.

Belmont had thirty bankers across six branches who were making outbound calls. Belmont uses the universal banker method, which entails a consultative, customer-centric approach when engaging with clients and prospects. Bankers were required to reach five contacts live on the phone every day. They were converting 80% of face-to-face meetings—so they were successful on that front. However, Belmont needed to make their bankers more effective on the phone to drive branch traffic to produce these face-to-face opportunities.

Before working with Gryphon, Belmont had no insight into the call details of their agents. They were unable to monitor call length or the outcome of each call. Tracking was performed manually, so errors were frequent due to miscalculations. Not to mention call visibility was also limited by their dispersed branches.

“Although difficult to verify, we were using binders and spreadsheets in a very manual process, our conversion rate was less than 1%,“ says Morgan Cambern, SVP/Director of Retail Banking at Belmont Savings Bank.

Strategy

The Gryphon Customer Success Team worked with Cambern to determine key performance indicators (KPIs) and performance goals Belmont would monitor based on their specific needs.

The strategy for Belmont involved assigning a number on the telephone keypad to each call outcome. After making a call, bankers would then, depending on the outcome of their call, press the corresponding number on the keypad to automatically capture and report all call information to the Gryphon Sales Performance Dashboard.

KPIs created for Belmont were determined based on criteria for measuring the effectiveness of each banker over the phone. These included calls to contact, which helped the bank establish a minimum activity standard for all bankers, and call attempt frequency, which gave Belmont’s branch managers the ability to ensure their bankers were engaging with clients and prospects at least three times.

Further, Belmont was able to better understand patterns of behavior through the third and fourth KPIs—disposition adherence and contacts to set appointment. Disposition adherence provides managers with a quantified analysis of effectiveness and allows them to designate and track all required actions needed from their bankers. By recording contacts to set appointment, Belmont could track the number of conversations that resulted in set appointments, and from there develop best practice standards for their bankers by noting the patterns of behavior that lead to success, according to metrics.

Results

With Gryphon, Belmont’s conversion rates went from less than 1% to 3%.

The bank was able to establish a data-driven approach built on the behaviors and processes proven to produce desired results. Specifically, Belmont was able to draw a correlation between bankers with the highest performing KPIs and the bankers who achieve 100% of their sales quota each quarter.  Belmont’s bankers are now performing at a higher level, and their managers are able to better train and manage bankers.

To maintain this behavior, Belmont branches hold morning kick-off staff meetings to review performance activity and highlight needed areas of improvement using Gryphon’s Sales Performance Dashboard. For Belmont, Gryphon’s dashboard creates accountability and provides the data needed to build performance benchmarks for bankers.

“If you can’t inspect it, you can’t measure it,” says Cambern. “And if you can’t measure it, you can’t hold your employees accountable.”

To learn how Gryphon can do the same for your bank, click here.