Banks score with 'high touch' service
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Designed to sell
The high-touch approach dovetails nicely with the need for more sit-down time to sell customers on the bank's expanding and increasingly complex menu of investment and insurance products.

In some high-touch stores, kiosks, "pods" or "towers" have replaced the traditional teller line. A concierge center, similar to a restaurant hostess station or hotel concierge desk, has eliminated the need for the velvet-rope queue.

Meanwhile, flat-screen TVs and plasma wall screens stream live stock quotes or business news. Comfortable furniture groupings replace the regimental rows of bank adviser desks. Only lively hanging promotional posters break the open floor plan. Cool extras include a coffee barista station, a children's play area, Wi-Fi and even a cozy gas fireplace.

Washington Mutual's high-touch Occasio design, two years in the planning and unveiled in 2000, received the first patent ever awarded for a full-service branch concept. It features circular layouts, teller towers, khaki-clad concierge and service representatives, and a "WaMu Kids" play area stocked with activities, books and Game Boys.

Half of all 2,250 WaMu locations are full Occasio stores, and two-thirds incorporate aspects of the design.

"Occasio gives our staff greater flexibility in serving the customer. They're able to rapidly open additional teller tower stations when the bank gets busy, as we don't have cash drawers to manage. Store colleagues can move from tower to tower with relative ease to service customers," says McSweeney.

"In situations where the customer has additional needs, our employees can walk away from the teller tower with the customer and sit down with them and a manager to discuss more time-consuming issues like personal equity products."

Comfortably profitable
What profits may lie in such creature comforts?

Lani Hayward, executive vice president of creative strategies for Umpqua Bank, credits the bank's high-touch sea change in 1995 with driving its growth from six locations and $140 million in deposits back then to its current 147 locations with more than $8 billion in deposits.

"The results that happened out of that were astounding," she says. "We went from third in market share in a totally flat economy to first in less than three years. That was stealing (customers) from the competition because there was no one moving into town."

Umpqua first acquired its competitive difference internally by expanding the role of its tellers. In the process, tellers went from one-trick ponies to multitasking customer reps who do more than smile and issue receipts, especially when manning the central Serious About Service Desk.

"There are people there to answer all sorts of questions, from bank-related questions to what's playing at the theater down the street," Hayward says. "What happens is, you empower the people on the front line to do more than they were doing before and it makes them feel entrepreneurial about their location and the bank in general."

That creates a bottom-line bright spot, Hayward says.

"Our efficiency ratios are as good or better than many of these banks that have cut staff," she says.