It’s Personal: Drivers of Member Purchase Intent as a Result of the Branch Experience
What do potential members want as a result of a visit to your branch? Or, perhaps more importantly, what drives potential members to want to open an account as a result of a visit to your branch?
To answer these questions, Kinesis conducted research into the efficacy of the branch sales process and identified several service and sales attributes that drive member purchase intent. In our observational research of 100 credit union new account presentations, mystery shoppers were asked to describe what impressed them positively as a result of the visit to the credit union. Excluding the branch atmosphere, the five most common themes contained in these open-ended comments were:
- Interest in Helping/ Personalized Service/ Attention to Needs,
- Professional/ Courteous/ Not Pushy,
- Friendly Employees, and
- Product Knowledge of/ Confidence in the Representative
To understand the relative importance of these behaviors with respect to purchase intent, shoppers were asked to rate their purchase intent as a result of the presentation. Kinesis used this rating to group these shops into two groups (those with positive and negative purchase intent) and compared the results of these two groups to each other. Of these positive impressions, three have strong relationships to purchase intent. They are present with greater frequency in shops with positive purchase intent compared to those with negative purchase intent.
|
Reason for Positive Purchase Intent |
Relative Frequency Positive to Negative Purchase Intent |
| Product Knowledge of/ Confidence in the Representative | 2.7 |
| Interest in Helping/ Personalized Service/ Attention to Needs | 2.5 |
| Friendly Employee | 2.3 |
The representative’s product knowledge was cited 2.7 times more frequently in shops with positive purchase intent compared to shops with negative purchase intent. Similarly, attention to needs and personalized service was present 2.5 times more frequently in shops with positive purchase intent compared to those with negative purchase intent. Finally, shoppers were 2.3 times more likely to cite the friendliness of branch personnel in shops with positive purchase intent relative to negative.
Member experiences which focus on personal attention, interest in helping, personalized service, professional, courteous and friendly encounters drive purchase intent as a result of a visit to a credit union.
Kinesis CEM 