A recent story in the Wall Street Journal notes that as part of its takeover of Washington Mutual (WaMu), Chase is moving away from the Occasio concept bank branches that WaMu introduced a few years ago.
This is not a moment too soon. As a WaMu customer, it was the time, money and attention to these high-concept, low utility branches that finally put me over the edge and made me a former customer.
It was bad enough that WaMu had fairly poor online banking tools compared to other banks, or that their phone service was not great, but the focus on this ridiculous idea vs. good ole fashioned customer service was just too much. Everyone was confused when these branches were introduced, and no one, especially the poor tellers who had to work there all day, seemed to be enjoying the experience. At my local branch, where a number of the customers don’t speak English as a first language, it was total confusion.
The branches did look very nice–warm colors, modern signage. In fact, it looked like what you’d expect to see if Starbucks opened a bank. But here’s the catch: I don’t want to bank at a pretty bank, and I don’t want to bank at Starbucks, I want to bank at a real *bank*–one where they know who I am, they can provide quick and efficient service and we don’t have technology for the sake of technology. (The fact that tellers couldn’t handle money in this scenario was just plain stupid. You had to go to multiple “stations” to make a deposit, take out cash, complete transactions. What were they thinking?)
This on top of WaMu’s total obsession with making home loans to the exclusion of all other services told me to run not walk to another bank. I wish I could tell you I predicted the banking collapse, but that’s not the case…just that WaMu was pretty darn clueless, since it was not that hard to get a loan from any other sources besides the bank, for example bad credit payday loans are a loan service that differs somewhat from the usual types of loan available. Simplepayday.co.uk offer just such a loan service and require nothing more than a UK bank account and the applicant to be in full-time employment.
I wonder if they did any kind of testing of this concept with actual customers and employees before rolling it out. And, if they did, did anyone look at the results?
