Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette (Texas)
Some area bank tellers are being asked to balance more than their cash drawers. In some cases, they might find themselves weighing their customers’ financial interests against their own job security.
Many banks encourage tellers to recommend appropriate products and services to their customers. For example, if a client mentions an upcoming vacation, the teller will likely point out that the bank offers travelers’ checks. If another customer complains of car problems, the attentive teller will mention the bank’s low interest rate on auto loans.
But some banks, including Wells Fargo and Fifth Third, are taking teller cross-selling a step further by basing a portion of employees’ performance evaluations on how many customers pursue those suggested services or products.
Employees who repeatedly fail to meet the established quota risk being fired.
One California-based consumer rights advocate described the trend as “offensive” and “dangerous.”
“People don’t have their defenses up when they walk into a bank like they might when they walk onto a used-car lot,” said Doug Heller, executive director of The Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights.
“It’s particularly offensive that when we simply try to get our own money out of the bank, we’re going to be blistered with sales pitches from tellers who are afraid for their job,” he said. “It’s forcing the teller to be the hard seller.”
Bank executives argue the quotas they’ve set in the past year or two aren’t aggressive and don’t spur employees to push unnecessary products on unsuspecting customers.
Setting sales goals
Andy Veenstra, Wells Fargo’s Fort Wayne president, said his full-time tellers are asked to make an average of one referral to a personal banker per day in addition to processing an average of one additional request every other day. Part-time tellers are asked to meet half that quota, and all employees’ performance is averaged over 90 days.
The requirements are reasonable, Veenstra said, when you consider tellers average 120 to 140 transactions in an eight-hour day. That works out to 600 to 700 opportunities each week to make five referrals to personal bankers and handle two or three services at the teller window. Personal bankers handle bank products including car and home loans and certificates of deposit. Tellers can conduct certain requests at their windows, including helping customers set up direct deposit, apply for a debit card and apply for a credit card.
San Francisco-based Wells Fargo doesn’t establish minimums within specific product lines, requiring tellers to push credit cards, for example, on customers who don’t want them, Veenstra said.
“It’s not based on the product. It’s based on what the customer’s needs are,” he said.
Warsaw-based Lake City Bank also bases its tellers’ performance evaluations, in part, on how many customers broaden their banking business.
But the quotas, which Regional Manager Bruce Wright wouldn’t quantify, are measured at the group level.
And cash bonuses are awarded to every teller on a team that meets its goal. If the quota was 10 referrals, for example, the same amount of incentive pay goes to every team member, even if one person had five, another had one and another didn’t make any referrals, Wright said.
“Some people have better months than others,” he said.
Such an unequal situation wouldn’t be allowed to persist, however. A supervisor would address the situation with a teller who consistently failed to contribute to the team’s goal, Wright said.
Bankers said the expectations for all employee positions have evolved over the years. Many staff members now can earn bonuses for meeting certain performance goals. And, when they don’t meet the outlined job duties, it becomes a performance issue and they receive coaching. If the situation persists, the worker faces possible termination.
Like Wells Fargo, Fifth Third Bank measures teller performance on an individual basis. But the Cincinnati-based bank pays a set commission for each product or service sold.
For example, a successful mortgage application reaps the referring teller $30, and a customer credit card application pays $25, said Bob Slaven, Fifth Third vice president and northeast Indiana retail regional manager.
Full-time tellers are expected to accrue at least $150 in commissions each month. Part-time tellers have a $75 goal. They start each month with a clean slate.
“It’s very attainable,” Slaven said.
Fifth Third employees, who receive bonuses on a quarterly basis, are paid the amount they earn, even if it falls below the performance standard. And there’s no cap on the upper end. Some tellers earn more than $1,000 a month merely from commissions, Slaven said.
Wells Fargo groups teller sales efforts into three categories: bottom, mid-range and top. Bonus amounts are determined by which category an employee falls into. Top-selling tellers’ quarterly incentive pay can exceed $1,500, Veenstra said.
Wright wouldn’t put a dollar figure on Lake City’s quarterly bonus pay, but he described the rewards as “modest” and “not even close” to $1,500.
Like its competitors interviewed for this article, Lake City doesn’t put sales goals on the number of customers it hopes to attract to specific items or services.
“I think it has more potential of creating customer ill will,” Wright said, “if you’re just pushing a product.”
Let the buyer beware
Heller, of The Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights, based in Los Angeles, said customers are already tired of receiving a hard sell from banks in the form of telemarketing calls and mailed offers.
Requiring tellers to sell bank products ups the ante, he said.
“We should be able to go to our banks, get our money, make our deposits, without fearing that we’re entering a combative relationship every time,” Heller said.
“Unless Wells Fargo is going to have a sticker on each teller window saying, ‘I’m paid more if you buy more services,’ there’s no way for caveat emptor — for buyer beware — because no consumer expects that the teller has an incentive to upsell them or to get them to buy things they don’t need,” he said.
It’s a matter of expectations. When customers walk into a bank, they’re not prepared for a sales pitch, Heller said.
On the contrary, bankers say, customers expect bank staff to make them aware of products and services that address their specific needs.
Fifth Third’s Slaven said “the vast majority” of the bank’s customers appreciate product and services suggestions from tellers. A teller who accepts weekly deposits without mentioning the bank offers direct deposit, for example, isn’t providing appropriate and helpful information, he said.
“Our training all revolves around appropriateness,” he said. “There’s no high pressure.”
Wells Fargo and Lake City also emphasize teller training as the way to address concerns about overzealous sales efforts. Those same training sessions are also used to overcome other tellers’ hesitancy to hawk products.
Tracey Mills, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based American Bankers Association, said a growing number of banks are trying to cross-sell their products and services to existing customers.
“And using front-line employees for that makes sense,” she said.
Mills couldn’t say whether evaluating tellers on the number of products sold is a trend because she hadn’t heard of the practice. Although she tracks trends in retail banking, she doesn’t always hear about bank strategies that they prefer to keep quiet for competitive reasons.
Banks that adopt the strategy run the risk, however, of tellers being perceived as being too pushy. It’s a fine line between helping and hard selling, Mills said.
“It’s really important that they’re properly trained,” she said.
An aggressive approach could erode a bank’s bottom line. Miller cited survey results that showed more than 70 percent of customers said bad customer service would cause them to change banks.
Tower Bank doesn’t evaluate tellers on how many customers increase their business with the bank. And Trois Hart, marketing vice president, doesn’t expect the Fort Wayne-based bank will pursue the practice.
But she shied away from criticizing her competitors’ use of sales goals to gauge employee performance. Tower could put its own spin on employee quotas, which aren’t inherently flawed, she said.
“It depends on what you measure,” Hart said. “Our goal is to deepen relationships with clients, so that’s what we ultimately will be measuring. ‘ And that is more than just a cross-sell.”
Jean Ann Fox, consumer protection director for the Washington-based Consumer Federation of America, agreed that customers don’t expect tellers to transform into salesmen. But consumers aren’t defenseless, she said. They can move their accounts out of banks that create an aggressive sales atmosphere.
