My wife Samantha and I love the sea. We try to boat, sail, or generally get into the salt water as much as we can. We recently had an opportunity to spend a week on the island of Antigua (we were scouting for a 2020 sailing trip) and we did a lot of snorkeling. We were staying at a condo booked via AirBnB, and there was a lovely beach right below our villa. We had snorkeled there several times and it was just lovely. There was also a path (a relatively short walk) that took us over to another bay about a hundred yards away. So one morning, we decided to take our snorkeling gear to the other bay and snorkel around the peninsula to our beach. We checked to make sure we would not be facing any inclement weather, and all was good, so off we set. We entered the water in the other bay and …
Innovation ThinkTime
What’s In a Name?
While vacationing on the island of Antigua, I could not help but notice a particular restaurant we passed by every day. Here is the restaurant: So my question is, would you eat at Good Luck Restaurant? Now, if you took “good luck” to mean that if you eat there, you will receive good luck, then it is possible you might want to eat there frequently. If, however, you thought this might mean a chancy prospect from a culinary standpoint, you might think twice about making a reservation. Consider you tell a friend that you are planning to go eat there and their response was, “Good luck!” That would not swell you with confidence about your upcoming meal. In fact, you might be asking some additional questions of your friend to ascertain exactly what they know about this …
Uber customer service exceeds expectations
In most situations, I use Uber instead of a cab. It’s just more convenient, and the mobile app makes communication for where and when I can get picked up vastly superior to any taxi option I know of. (By the way, do you think if taxi companies had started developing mobile apps 10 years ago, there would have been an opportunity for Uber or Lyft to eat their lunch for passenger delivery?) So I get dropped off, say thanks, and head to my destination. I get the receipt from Uber, and I go into the app to rate the driver and leave a tip. This driver made no attempt to help me with bags or to even open the back hatch for me. So I rated him a 4 out of 5 and left an OK tip, though not the amount I would normally leave. I received a secondary email from Uber thanking me for rating and tipping …
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Don’t Inadvertently Limit Innovation
I asked 16 payments executives to draw a vase. Let me explain… I have been facilitating strategic planning for 20 years for one organization, PaymentsFirst. P1st is a nonprofit payments association headquartered in Atlanta, and serves financial institutions and corporations in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. Their executives are some of the most well-respected in their industry. The board is made up of banking executives from across all four states. And they are pretty sharp too. Which makes planning for strategic planning all the more difficult. In order to liven the planning session and to stimulate innovative thinking, I do thinking exercises. These elements break the monotony of talking about mission, vision, goals, and strategic objectives. But if you have …
Being Strategic by Improving the Customer Experience
The issue of how you can improve the customer experience cannot be adequately covered in a few hundred words. Let me give two examples, one dealing with the digital / online experience and one dealing with the physical branch. If you are like most FIs, you have multiple online banking systems. Typically, you would have a consumer login, separate cash management login, and perhaps, even a separate Small to Medium Business (SMB) system. If a consumer starts a small business on the side, they are likely running that out of their consumer online access. But as they grow, they need to access features that are not available in the consumer online banking package. Such as the need to originate ACH or do a periodic wire transfer. No problem, you say, they can upgrade to the cash management …
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