How to build a bank's bottom line through customer loyalty.

• Author: Solomon, Micah
• Position: MARKETING NEWS

THE FASTEST, MOST RELIABLE WAY--BAR NONE--TO BUILD a strategic, sustainable advantage in banking is to focus on creating true customer loyalty, says Micah Solomon, an adviser to corporations on customer service and customer experience.

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"Truly loyal customers are much more immune to teaser offers from the bank across the street--and are more willing to forgive your inevitable small foibles when they occur," notes Solomon, who is also an author and speaker. Plus: Far and away, especially in our social media-heavy era, they are a bank's best source of credible marketing, he adds.

Solomon offers bank marketers the following pointers on how to build this type of strong customer loyalty.

1. Shake a leg. Modern banking customers expect speedier service than did any generation before them. (Not only speedier than their parents expected, but even than they themselves expected this time last year!) In this age of iPhones and Droids, LendingTree and Yelp, you may as well not respond to loan inquiries at all if you're going to respond late.

   And as far as teller performance, Jim S. Miller and Prime Performance showed in a recent study that a bank's net satisfaction score "drops from 90 percent to 23 percent when customers find the wait time unacceptable," and an approximately equal amount when banking customers "feel their time is not valued." Consider finding new ways to value financial customers' time, like Citizens Bank's recent introduction of full-fledged commercial mobile banking: This kind of respect for customers' sense of time urgency is a crucial competitive advantage in today's banking marketplace.

2. Completely nail your hellos and goodbyes. Extensive psychological research shows that customers remember the first and last minutes of a service encounter more vividly--and for much longer--than the rest of it. And the first impression you make may start well before the customer actually enters your bank: Are your hours being correctly listed on Google Places? (If not, fix them--the customer will blame you, not Google.)

   Does the parking lot appear attractive and appealing from all angles? (A major bank branch near me looks great as long as you are on the bank property, but literally one inch over the property line is all rust and decay--and that inch is the one arriving customers see first.) If the bank officers thought about the importance of the entrance experience, they'd have their maintenance crew go the "extra inch" to...