Hiring the right frontline staff members who can create a member-centric culture while delivering on sales and productivity goals is a challenge. The key is to identify attributes that will help deliver service excellence. This research takes as a given that credit union sales and service culture should be member centric, and that needs-based selling is the right way for a cooperative to treat existing and new members. Many credit unions struggle to find and keep high-performing frontline staff while doing too little to encourage underperforming staff to improve or work elsewhere.
To glean useful insights, the research starts with a pool of 4,667 frontline staffers and narrows it down to employees who have had least eight secret shopper reviews. The analysis in this report draws on insights about tellers and account representatives who score in the top 20% of sales and service. It is important to develop specific sales and service processes if we want employees to be fully effective. Simply training employees on the skills they need to implement and telling them they need to implement them will not work effectively. For each position, a specific service and selling process should be developed.
Filene thanks our generous supporters for making this important research possible.