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Chase, in need of improvement, buys TV spots
Jan 10, 2008
You're Chase. The credit crisis hurt you badly, and you need to reconnect with customers. But competitors like Commerce Bank are growing fast and taking away your customers. (Commerce Bank offers customer-centered benefits like weekend hours and free change-counting.)
What's a multinational bank to do, to show the world that it can compete? Do you make a strategic investment in the customer experience?
No. If you're Chase, you spend $70 million on a new ad campaign, mainly to buy TV commercials with a new boastful tag line.
From the New York Times, Trying to Be Heard Above the Din, and Be Trusted:
When "Chase" is used as a verb, he noted, it "has a lot of energy and pursuit behind it." One television spot, in which an ordinary man makes a James Bond-like entrance, highlights Chase's fraud alert service.
So much for weekend hours, change-counting, and well-trained tellers. Chase's strategy is to buy more advertising.
Correction: This column originally listed Citibank, but the article is (obviously, from the pull quote) about Chase. Correction made - sorry for the error.
See also:
• Budgeting for advertising and the customer experience
• Customer experience and umbrellas
Well, i got Chased away by the default
rate . they wouldn't lower it so i re- financed from their almost 30 percent to an ok 11.2... I figured if i have an 718 credit rating they could have figured something else out O well
I'd be curious to know, 3-5 years from now, which campaign (advertising vs user-experience-improvements) produced the highest net # of customers. I bet ads (tragically) are more effective at increasing new customers, and user experience initiatives are more effective at retaining customers. But, which one produces the best net customer numbers?
What's a multinational bank to do, to show the world that it can compete? Do you make a strategic investment in the customer experience?
No, you raise your out-of-network ATM fees to $3 per withdrawal.
Brilliant move, Chase. Drive more customers away with ridiculous, overpriced fees. Way to go. Idiots.
I was never a Chase Customer but have switched banks several times both for my business and personnal accounts once the encumbent bank started treating customers like crap - usually the result of mergers. I switched to Commerce Bank about a year ago and have never been happier in 25 years of banking. Recently Commerce Bank was bought out by TD Bank (Canadian). I hope the Commerce model stays the same.
Personally, I am NEVER persuaded by advertisments of any sort.
Chase seems to be doing its best to leave a bad customer experience with me. I have a credit card there, as it had a 1%to 3% payback for use. I pay my account off each month so am not as concerned about interest rate. But I am bombarded with phone, email and mail solicitations. The most deceptive are the "checks" from $25 to $100, several a month, which if you read the very fine print, are really signups for various services and items. Every communication from them needs to be scanned very closely to see if it is really a "gotcha".