Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey everybody. You're listening to Top Quartile where we bring you stories from the front lines of growth in community focused financial services.
Welcome to the Top Quartile podcast. My name is Dan Marks. I'm a partner in EVP here with Infusion. That brings you Top Quartile. And today my guest is my colleague and friend Rick Claypool, who is another one of our EVPs and heads up a lot of the thought leadership around our client Analytics.
Rick, great to have you this morning.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Thanks Dan. Glad to be here. Looking forward to today's conversation.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Yeah, we are actually recording this on Groundhog Day. You have a special connection to Groundhog Day. So what is that?
[00:00:43] Speaker B: Interestingly enough, I went to College about 17 miles from where Punsutawney Phil lives.
So it was quite the cause celeb back on February 2nd when I was a youngster.
And the movie is, yes, relatively accurate to the absurd mayhem of a groundhog predicting the weather.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Very good. And endless Groundhog day jokes about 2020. So tell our listeners a little bit more about your background in banking and analytics and all the things that are relevant to what we're going to be talking about today.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Sure. So I've had an interesting slash lucky career string of events. I've been in banking my entire career, so over 25 years now. I started my journey at PNC bank in Pittsburgh.
I worked in credit policy back then, spent some time doing that, evaluating corporate deals, specifically asset based lens lending and the financing arm associated with that.
After a number of years there, I moved over to corporate finance at PNC and then eventually wandered into a role as a product manager at pnc. And that's really been the trajectory that my career has been on ever since. I've been in product management and product marketing for a little over 15 years since then and have worked in multiple institutions in three or four different places across the country. I have had the very good fortune of working at a regional bank, a super regional bank, a multinational bank, and a community bank.
So I've had the benefit really of seeing things from a lot of perspectives and then also wearing many hats inside of the institutions that I worked for.
And today when I refer to it as lucky, I use the word lucky and I use the word benefit. What's great is in the way that we, you know, work with and serve our clients.
Today it's very similar. We work with folks all over the country.
We work with folks big and small, we work with banks and we work with credit unions and we get up every day trying to solve the problems for our clients that I used to solve when I was a client or in that role.
Just again, very fortunate in terms of how things work out, in terms of the set of experiences that allowed me to get to this place and I always enjoyed in the jobs that I've had, solving problems and being creative and being thoughtful. And now I get to do it for for dozens of clients simultaneously. And that's frankly a real shot in the arm. It's fun to get up in the morning and think about these types of problems for this many folks and help them succeed and just being a partner in their journey, it's a real blessing.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: Awesome. And so we talked about Puxtoni Phil, already.
What is maybe one other fascinating thing about you that most people don't know?
[00:03:57] Speaker B: I don't know about fascinating, Dan and I can come up with a lot of things people don't know about me. For lack of better phrasing. My claim to fame is once upon a time when I was a product executive and a marketing executive, I was actually awarded the Maverick Banker of the Year, which was a really cool event. It was. I was basically acknowledged as the most innovative marketing executive in the country in the retail banking space for some creative product work that I had done what seems like a long time ago, but it really wasn't that long ago. But we had myself and my team created the first customizable checking account. Cool.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: Let's dive into our topic and today it's an exciting one that sort of goes in and out of favor depending on the cycle. Banking Director did A M and a survey last year and found that some banks were pausing amid the pandemic. But then as 2021 spawned, we see some of this picking up. So it's a very topical topic and that is the importance of customer analytics in planning for and executing a bank or credit union merger or acquisition. So let's dive in.
You mentioned PNC and another bank fairly recently. In the last few weeks, PNC and BBVA Compass announced they were merging and you've actually worked for both those companies.
You have a unique perspective. And of course both of us have been involved in multiple deals over the course of our respective careers, and many of the executives at Infusion have as well. So in your experience and the experience of the firm, what are some of the keys to successful mergers and acquisitions really?
[00:05:56] Speaker B: I would echo my comments just a moment ago about putting the customer at the center of the experience.
Acquisitions and integrations are, by and large, traditionally, and still to this day, technological integrations There are numbers baked into the equation. And the folks who are really tasked with putting two organizations together have to more often than not flip back to a set of numbers that they really had nothing to do with creating.
Now there's not much we can do about that. That is the nature of the way these things work.
So the challenge really I think for individuals, bankers who are working on these types of things become how best do I achieve those numbers based on what I have in front of me?
And when I say integrations are largely technical, more often than not, when you look at these types of things, and if you look at there'll be a steering committee and there'll be a chair of the steering committee and the chair might be a business person, but the person who's running the day to day activities associated with an integration tends to be someone in the IT part of the organization, maybe even the head of the IT organization.
Okay, that makes sense. It doesn't matter if you put all these pieces together legally, if they don't work technically, if the day that you flip the switch and bring folks onto your bank and onto your platform, if they can't access their accounts online, if for some reason their routing number doesn't work, things like that, the real basics of the business, then what have you done? The problem is while that is in fact the basic table stake for success, it also simultaneously, more often than not, does seem to become not just the predicate for success, but the definition of success.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: Did the project happen?
[00:08:12] Speaker B: Did the project happen? That's exactly right.
And so what gets lost in that is what? It's the customer experience.
Did anyone actually put themselves in the shoes of, of the acquired checking account holder and understand, would they be happy? How will they feel about this? What would they think about this?
And this is the part that's always funny in banking, right? When you start to talk about people's feelings as a marketer, people just roll their eyes and just oh, feelings, right, yeah, feelings, yeah, that's your customer. And at the end of the day they're the ones that pay your salary.
So maybe the people who pay your salary might want to think about their feelings. By and large acquisitions happen and we hear about successes and we hear about failures.
And to the degree to which there are failures, sometimes the squeaky wheel syndrome does get over amplified.
And so you have to be measured about how you really think about what does success look like.
By the same token, if there is enough squeaky wheels, it becomes a real problem.
I had a experience years ago, fortunately it was A colleague of mine, not me specifically, they were on the west coast. They had a very successful integration. Things went great, technically, everything perfect. Everyone up till 4 o' clock in the morning on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, right
[00:09:50] Speaker A: the over, over the weekend, integration, war room.
[00:09:54] Speaker B: They got up Monday morning, everyone felt exhausted but happy.
And then everything went wrong.
Okay, what went wrong, what they didn't account for was a bunch of folks calling them literally at the opening of business on Monday morning at 9am and checking, calling the call centers and saying, what is the balance in my account?
And they got overwhelmed and the call center basically could not handle it. People were on hold for two hours.
And so while there was literally nothing wrong, everyone had their money, everything footed to the penny. There wasn't a single client who really actually had a problem.
But what became came true in a matter of less than a couple hours was everything seemed broken when it really wasn't.
And the single problem they had was the failure to anticipate inbound call volume. Monday morning, 9am and these are not complicated calls.
Validate who the client is.
Yes sir, you have $223.72 or yes ma', am, you have $7,006 and 98 cents. That's all it would have taken. But they got so many calls so quickly, they couldn't handle the calls. People went on hold, on hold for extended periods of time.
And all of a sudden a successful integration was deemed a failure.
That's the failure to really think through what would my clients feel or think or want post integration.
And so all this stuff, I really think it's not different than what we should be doing as professional marketers. Every single day we should be thinking about our clients and asking our question, what's the unmet problem?
What's the unmet problem and how do I solve it?
And as you're going through integrations, you should be thinking, okay, these to be acquired and integrated customers, what is the unmet problem?
And their unmet problem is not, will I have online banking services, Will I be able to access the app, Will I be able to clear checks? They're assuming that's working.
And yet our focus, more often than not our singular focus during integration periods is making all those things happen.
And that's not a customer problem, that's a bank problem.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And you mentioned online banking. One of the things that you see in more recent deals is that is happening. People get your notice, they say, okay, you're switching this weekend. If you're going to tell me if you're. Whenever you Tell me. Online banking and mobile banking is going to be up and, oh, by the way, if it's more than, if it's not available for more than 24 hours, people get really nervous because it's that it's. You're saying, it's the feeling about the money. I want to verify that the money is there. And if the main way that I check on my balance and those kind of things is through the app or online banking, I want to log in on Saturday or Sunday.
And so exactly what you're talking about has just accelerated.
And so understanding what is that experience, being able to very, very clearly explain it and then have the staffing and all that. And also just expecting, like you were saying, okay, people are going to call, some percentage of people are going to call.
They either need help logging in for the first time or they just want the assurance of, I'm talking to somebody. I've never, this is my first experience with your bank in some cases, and they just want to understand. And so, so let's talk about how customer analytics can be used within the context you've articulated to more effectively plan for and then be able to execute on a great customer experience.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think, to the point, Dan, if we accept the premise that the experience really does trump everything else, not to the exclusion or exception of a successful technological integration, but at the end of the day, if you don't do the experience part correctly as well as you do the other parts, you will fail.
Sure. So then if that's true, then what do we do about it? And I think that that really is where we get to this conversation around analytics. To, to your question, what I need to know is, who are these people?
Who am I bringing on? What is so about them, uniquely, individually, but then as macro segments or subsegments, and then begin to think through, okay, so what is their experience?
Ideally, we might think, okay, we're going to make a perfect experience for every single one of our clients that we're bringing on.
Practically, that's not possible.
Some of it is the relative ability to reach versus potentially large volume of folks. You referenced the PNC and BBVA integration earlier.
That's a pretty large integration. There are millions of customers coming on board. You can't talk to and customize and spend a half an hour with each one of those millions of customers.
What you can do is understand that of those millions of customers, a small subset of them really drive the value in the acquired portfolio.
And so you need to be, you need the ability to go in identify who are the ones that really drive the balance sheet and the income statement of this acquired portfolio and then think about what is it that I want to do with those folks. I need to understand what is so about those folks. Where do they live, how old are they, what life stage are they in, what are their motivations, what are their concerns, what are their fears?
A lot of that conversation is qualitative and I would encourage people who are in the midst of an acquisition spend a little money on that type of research. The quantitative elements will allow you, in very precise and accurate ways, understand who is coming on and what is so about those people.
Part of it is understanding the basic set of numbers associated with those folks. In other words, where are they in terms of their balances, what products do they have? Those types of things, the basic characteristics, some of it is the demographic information that can be applied to those folks that gives you a sense of, okay, here's what's so about them and here is what is unseen in terms of the share wallet perspective that we have and putting those pieces together and creating an effective segmentation strategy around those folks that is singularly focused on the experience we want to cause with those folks not focused first and foremost on the product mapping and how do we make sure we preserve certain revenue streams and those types of things.
I really believe, and I've seen it more often than not, if you are successful at the experience part, you'll be successful in the rest of the. The elements of the relationship. Right. The client will be satisfied. They're satisfied with what they have today and creating whatever revenue stream they have for the institution today.
Replicate and exceed what that is now and you'll protect those things. You don't have to worry about finding a way to fit them into certain product mapping schemas.
[00:18:07] Speaker A: Yeah, you mentioned, and product mapping, of course, is a critical part. Talk to me about what is the. Some of the extra impact of going beyond account level information and looking at customer and household level information in that planning process.
[00:18:23] Speaker B: So there's a couple layers there. First and foremost, our objective ought to be gathering as close to a 360 degree perspective of the client as possible.
So I want to understand not just what's true about them in terms of how they generate benefits for the institution vis a vis the size of their relationship, but the totality of their product set and why do they have that product set. If they're a mortgage holder, if they're a home equity customer, if they're a credit card customer, et cetera, et Cetera, et cetera, there are reasons that each of us have those products, right?
So real simple example. If I'm a mortgage holder versus a non, generally speaking, I've just told you that I'm a homeowner or not. If I'm a homeowner, I just told you that I'm a certain point in my life stage. If I'm a homeowner, there's a reasonably good chance that I have settled that I am at least a credit worthy customer. I qualify for credit. That also tells me something. If I look at checking accounts and I look at the transaction behaviors of checking accounts, I don't have to get real specific in what the debits and credits are. But if I know those are recurring ach, direct deposit, I right away I know something about that person. I don't have to know if that direct deposit is $10,000 a month or if it's $500 a month. Doesn't matter. What matters is using that basic quantity, quantitative data does immediately uncover something that's true about these people.
And if I know something that's true about these people, then I knew something that's probably a motivating factor for those people.
And so I would want to rally around that data point and think to myself what is so about this specific person relative to the conditions and behaviors inside their product portfolio?
It really is enlightening. I've joked about this through the years, but there are, I'm certainly not the first one to say this.
There's often a wide gulf in all of humanity between what we say we are and who we are.
And the one place we really demonstrate who we are is where we spend our money and that passes through the bank. It's a data stream. And it really is quite illuminating to understand the inflows and outflows of a checking account basically and what it tells you about folks. You don't have to look at them individually. This is not a spying Big Brother, et cetera.
It's just basically transaction flow of anonymized data and the process and the know how to create the data streams and cohorts associated with those things. That's really where I think the executive skill set comes in. And that's really where organizations have an opportunity take advantage of that. Do they know to look for it first and foremost?
And if they can look for it, or if they know to look for it, do they know what they're looking for and how do you make sense of it?
Excuse me. And I think that's where we really can help a lot of folks.
That's the benefit of our experience. That's not something that I knew how to do at the beginning of my career. But having gone through dozens and dozens of integrations over time, it becomes a critical lesson learned. And frankly, Dan, we've gone through periods and this is what happens in this industry.
You alluded to this earlier. There are periods where there's a lot of activity in terms of M and A and then there are periods where there's almost none.
And given certain kind of macroeconomic conditions that we've gone through over a period of time, most recently and still with the pandemic, there's not been a ton of those events. Right. We're starting to see more integration activity right now. We're starting to see more M and A activity right now.
But the folks who are really tasked with executing against that or they in their jobs seven years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, when there was peak level activity, probably not for a lot of folks, it might be their first time through.
So if you've never done this before, you will very likely become a prisoner of the circumstance and the current.
So you're going to end up in a spot that I referenced earlier, which is the IT person who's running the project is giving edicts, a finance person who has committed numbers that you have to solve for is running another part of the product and you're in the middle of the whole thing trying to figure out how do I make sure that all the pieces and parts work together and how do I make sure that I meet my numbers?
Neither of those conversations have really much to do with putting the customer at the center of your ideas and activities. And if you're a marketer and you're not putting the customer first and foremost in those things, you're either not a marketer or not doing your job. One of those two things is definitely true because if you're working for the IT guy or the finance guy, then you work in IT or finance, you don't work in marketing anymore, just to be clear.
[00:24:14] Speaker A: And that's where. And that's where you see more more recently, particularly the, the consulting firms that, that advise on integration is they've actually put started putting in a customer experience work stream, just like an associate experience work stream into mergers. And usually the, the marketer is asked to lead that which, which makes sense. And using the kind of analytics that we're talking about here is really a key kind of step zero to the process.
Be able to craft an Effective customer experience plan.
One example I'll share. You mentioned this Rick, and reminded we did some analysis at a household level. And so if you stop at account level, which you have to do for all the reasons we talked about, but we did this and realized there were dozens of customers with over 20 accounts. So if we sent them a letter, an individual letter by accounts, they would quite literally get 20 different letters.
Now one of the things is there's all whenever you household information there is.
It's not a precise science or it's a precise science, but it's got some dirty inputs.
And you we've also found is it's actually unless you're doing a manual review, automatically sending stuff at the household level can create let's say the householding is wrong by 200 people, 200 people get somebody else's information. That's not a, that's not a good customer experience at all.
But the how where the householding can work and just for very practical when you identify Those households with five or 10 or 20 different accounts, that can get triggered treated in kind of the high value queue like you talked about, where there's a manual review, in some cases one person got delivered information on 50 accounts personally. Right. And so you can by doing this analysis, it informs what is that customer level plan, what are the right treatments that make sense? Because at the end of the day these are thousands or tens of thousands or millions of new customers to your institution.
It's like you turn on the spigot and you're acquiring all these. They've got to be introduced to your institution.
But they expect based on their long experience with the previous bank or institution to be treated well and for you to know what that is. And so there's a lot of information that's got to happen in a very compressed time period based on that integration. So let's talk about how you can get a jump on that process because certainly some banks have a data analysis, a household analysis capability in house that can do some of this stuff. But let's talk a little bit about if you can start even earlier in the due diligence phase with a clean room, what the benefit is. So let's talk about just to make sure everybody understands what a clean room is.
What is it? Why is it important?
[00:27:08] Speaker B: Rick? Yeah, So I think to be even a little bit more specific nowadays, we would probably refer to it as a virtual clean room.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: In the context of what's a clean room, the clean room is that place where the data and documentations are Basically available without the legal right to the information per se. It could be pre announcement. It's usually, if not pre announcement, it would be pre legal acquisition where folks have the ability to go in and look at the numbers and look at the data, they make certain promises and typically sign some type of legal agreement to say I will not leverage this in any way, shape or form outside of the scope and context of this specific agreement.
And that's what's necessary. This is the basic application of really any potential merger of business entities in that regard.
And it's not exclusive to banking by any stretch. It would be in anything. Anytime you're trying to put that kind of stuff together and that's people, you have a non disclosure agreement, you go in, you do the work. What's happening in that thing? It's a very macro level analysis. It's a critically important macro level analysis because it has very much to do with valuation and what are we getting and what should people be buying or selling and what should that price be within that again, what gets lost, and I think it's a lesson learned, at least from my experience through the years, is that virtual clean room can also be the beginning of the customer experience and what effectively becomes a super onboarding event.
So what's a super onboarding?
So just think about basic onboarding. We all know this. If you're in this industry, if you've been in it for at least three minutes, you've heard the phrase onboarding, the two by two calls, etc.
With that, the first or second dollar you should spend should be approaching and addressing onboarding. Because the opportunity for increasing value of a new to bank or new to credit union, household or member is incredibly high. You've spent a lot of money, you've spent a lot of time trying to get them to become a new client. Now they're a new client. You have to maximize that opportunity.
So onboarding, just as a basic day to day business practice, is the process of maximizing the opportunity and maximizing the investment you've already made in customer or member acquisition super onboarding. So if we think about, if it's true that if I have a hundred new folks coming in a month or whatever the number is 110, 10 doesn't matter.
If I want to make sure that I'm maximizing the experience and the opportunity around those folks that come to me every single month.
And now I have an acquired portfolio and I'm going to get some significantly larger number of those folks simultaneously.
But it's amplified by the fact that a new to bank, a de novo household, they are largely not just the volume is small, but those relationships are in their infancy. It takes time to migrate checking activity. A person might open their account with 25 bucks. It may take them 90 days to fully fund up, get their direct deposit converted, start paying bills, etc etc etc.
With an acquisition and an integration, it's not 90 days, it's done the moment we flip the switch.
So the potential for value is multiplied on two fronts in a really magnificent way. One, there's significantly more volume coming online immediately than there would be with the relative trickle of folks coming in the door week by week, month by month, de novo.
Second, they're fully mature relationships and the risk is not so much how do I ensure that I fund them up, they're funded up now the risk is how do I maximize and retain what just cut over to me.
And then just with the case with onboarding, we want to look and say how do we expand this relationship? We're new, we just met each other. Here's a great opportunity to create a great experience and to prove out what I've been promising people I was going to do.
Again, very similar to the de novo customer. The person makes that purchase decision and ultimately the buying decision based on an assumption of the experience they're going to get about what's going to happen to them vis a vis your brand.
They're making that choice on the integration side, they're not making that choice. This choice was made for them.
And we are trying to pre integration promise them certain things, resell them on the idea that they are in the right place and they should stay with what they're doing and who they're with.
Okay, that being the case, how do we pay off on that promise quickly and early on in that relationship?
So onboarding versus super onboarding if you will. And the only way that you can pay off on that promise in a meaningful way is to know exactly who those folks are before they get to you. And that's really again where the data and the analytics come into a full understanding of who those folks are.
Segmentation strategy, customized set of experiences around cohorts which within that acquired portfolio, and I should note too, I'm using words like segmentation, acquired portfolio, blah blah blah. That's total accurate from a marketing science standpoint. It's completely impersonal in terms of actually thinking about those folks as people.
I would encourage any of our listeners to go ahead and use those words in a PowerPoint slide. That's great. But think about what those words mean. You're talking about real people. You're talking about a third grade teacher in West Texas who gets up every day and makes a better future for our world because of what she does with our children.
That's who we're talking about. We're not talking about numbers, we're talking about people.
[00:33:58] Speaker A: And so the faster you can do, the more time you have to do that analysis, you can just make that much better decisions and be relevant to that third grade teacher. It's one thing that's that we've, that I've learned over time is in when you're in the kind of clean room phase, sometimes a partner can do better analysis because in even the pre legal close, because legally it's tougher to give the acquirer the same level of granularity. A trusted third party with all the appropriate legal protections and data privacy and all those things can help understand and do analysis earlier, which helps you plan.
And then a perspective like infusion that sees data from hundreds of financial institutions can also just enrich that perspective, give you that much more insight to get ready to welcome. And I love your terminology, Rick, you got to resell them. I mean these are people and you were spot on. These are people that did not choose to open accounts at your institution.
They were sold, Their accounts were sold. And in the kind of leading up to the integration phase, you've got to not just communicate facts, but be aware of their mindset and be aware of the fact that this is an involuntary change from their perspective.
And so that's critical to understand what's the most appropriate thing to message about the event.
You're selling them. And then after the event, what's the way to super onboard and make sure that they stick around?
[00:35:35] Speaker B: You hit on a really important point inside that I've actually had more than once in my career where we were an acquiring bank. That should be a really shot in the arm. Invigorating, exciting moment. It's growth, it's opportunity, It's a lot of really cool things. It speaks to the financial health of your own organization. It should really be a shot in the arm.
And there have been many times, and I would bet right now this is one of those times where you would look at that as an acquirer and think, not one more thing I gotta do.
So if I'm working in an institution right now, what I know to be true is nobody is overstaffed anymore in this business model. Nobody has excess staff.
One of the really cool things, Dan, that I saw in 2020 was people, bank presidents, working the call center because of COVID and people and outages and everyone just jumping in.
And the real esprit de corps that is particularly found in the community banking in the credit union space, although it's not exclusive to them.
It was a really cool thing to watch.
But if I've got market presidents and bank presidents and CMOs, etc. Mainly the call center, it doesn't feel like that's their job and they probably have other things they should be doing.
In terms of what you were addressing, again, these integrations now it's one more thing to do. I was minding my own business, doing my own job and all of a sudden now I'm a PPP loan expert and I've got to figure out qualifications for certain things and the rules keep changing and Congress can't get settled on what's so and our lawyers have it. Holy heck.
There was a no point in time in my life where I thought, gosh, I'm going to be the PPP loan expert guy. Now I'm going to layer in an acquisition on top of that. This is where one it's a simple matter of bandwidth and where a third party who's independent and has capacity can literally take that load off of you and take that load off of you with the experience and qualifications that perhaps you may not have because you've not done this before or you've not done this in a very long time, but that the simple matter of the expertise is in and of itself the reason that you should engage someone else to work on those things and work through a virtual clean room to cause the events that you want to cause that we've discussed in this conversation.
The simple matter of having somebody else do the heavy lifting when you've got at least one, maybe two, maybe three other full time jobs, if you're already working on the weekends and now you've been asked and tasked to do this as well, in all fairness, it's a reasonable question to say how well. If we're the executives tasking our employees with this new assignment, it's fair to ask ourselves, how well can they do their job? How much more can we ask of them?
I'll just make this one last comment on this topic.
I really did marvel at what I experienced and saw in 2020 and the number of people who just willingly and very openly and enthusiastically jumped into different roles.
And the other really interesting thing that I saw was when we hit December of 2020, no one that I work with had taken anywhere near their vacationed allotment during the year.
Most of those folks ended up leaving days on the table.
Many of them were just basically out the month of December because they they hadn't taken a stinking day off.
And that's without the external influence of an acquisition on the organization. That's again, this is just what they're dealing with now.
So they're not taking vacation time because they can't, because they're dedicated and they're doing great work. There's a limit to how much you can ask people to do and when they're already working six days a week or 50 straight weeks.
Adding this, which is an incredibly important moment from a financial consideration standpoint, that your shareholders require this be exceptionally successful.
It's among the most important activities that will occur in a calendar year for sure have the right people focused on the right things. And if you just think it's magic, if it just happens and if you think again back to this point, if success is defined as we'll get the operations elements for loans and deposits to integrate and the thing will work, you're not thinking about it the right way and you've not thought through this problem fully. I would encourage anyone who's listening to really think about how do I expand my capacity with the right type of thinking and the right approach for the problem that's at hand. Back to the point about marketers.
What's my unmet need? And as a bank executive, my unmet need is likely capacity, resource, talent, experience, all directed at finally customer experience.
That's my end menu. That's what I need to address.
[00:41:17] Speaker A: Yeah. So what a great summary of the key insights here. Understanding, using customer analytics 360° Understand what's likely to be those unmet needs, those felt needs of the customers and then putting in place a very systematic customer experience plan pre deal close pre conversion and then post conversion. Super onboarding. Great conversation Rick. Before we completely wrap up, so let's just have a little fun at the end. If you could email your just starting off younger Rick from 25 years ago. Starting in business, what advice would you give young Rick?
[00:41:56] Speaker B: I should have spent more time on my dribbling and ball handling skills.
Through that vein I would tell younger Rick enjoy it, enjoy the ride, soak in everything.
Dan I think the one thing that I have learned along the way and I have done my best to impart this on the teams that I've been responsible for, is work is a place to exercise who you are as an individual.
And if, if that exercise is fun, then you got a great job. If that exercise is laborious and you dread it every day, you've got a terrible job.
But you can't. You're not a different person at work than you are at home. You're the same individual 24 7. You're trapped with yourself all the time your entire life.
Spend that time exercising who you are and maximizing who you can be.
And that's what I would tell little Rick.
[00:42:55] Speaker A: Awesome Rick. Thanks for a great discussion today. Till next time on Top Quartile. Thanks.
[00:43:01] Speaker B: Thank you, Dan.
[00:43:04] Speaker A: That's it for today on Top Quartile. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to Top Quartile wherever you find podcasts on any podcast app. And while you're at it, we'd really appreciate a five star rating. And if you're interested in getting an opportunity assessment, head over to infusionmarketinggroup.com to learn more. Thanks for listening.
