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Dotcomments
P.O. Box 71466
Albany, GA 31708

Contact:
Contact: Duncan Moore
Chris Hatcher
800.226.6395

Synovus Financial Corp. Tracks Customer-Satisfaction Levels,
Improves Branch Performance with Dotcomments¡ InTouch System

Georgia's second largest financial-services company is serious about delighting its customers. Synovus Financial Corp. has virtually doubled the number of customer-satisfaction surveys it conducts at 235 bank branches by adopting Dotcomments' InTouch customer-satisfaction system.

The versatile InTouch system forms the basis of a comprehensive customer-satisfaction program that Synovus launched in May. The program encompasses 1,600 customer surveys that Synovus conducts each month to measure the level of professional service it provides to thousands of customers. The bank then employs a far-reaching series of coaching exercises that focus on areas of improvement identified in the surveys.

"Customer care is extremely important to Synovus," says Luke Mansour, Sr., director of sales for the company. "It's the foundation upon which we built the banks in our network."

Mansour is responsible for managing a regional sales team of nine professionals assigned to 40 independently chartered banks operating in five Southeastern states. In total, Synovus and Dotcomments teamed up to monitor customer-service levels at 235 of the bank's 285 branches.

Synovus may be regional in scope, but it is a financial powerhouse in the Southeast. From its headquarters in Columbus, Ga., the holding company provides banking and financial services, including credit, debit and private-label card processing, through its majority-owned Total System Services. Last year, Synovus generated more than $516 million in net income on $2.5 billion in revenue.

"Obtaining accurate information about the level of service we provide is extremely important to Synovus," Mansour says. "The better we understand from our customers what we're doing well, the more we can improve on what we're not doing well. It also gives us a chance to strengthen and promote what we are doing well."

The innovative InTouch system is a turnkey frontline-effectiveness solution that enables branch managers to obtain accurate information on a customer's banking experience in less than 60 seconds using a hand-held personal digital assistant (PDA) right at the point of service. Unlike other customer-survey methods, the InTouch system allows a manager to survey customers immediately after their experience with a teller or platform-banking representative. That way, the experience is still fresh in their minds and customers can provide accurate information about their experiences.

"The information we obtain falls into two categories," Mansour says. "Are we providing the level of professionalism that we should be providing? Are we shaking hands? Are we standing up to greet the customer? Are we making sure our teller lines are moving quickly enough for our customers? And, secondly, how well are we meeting the needs of our customers by using the bank's sales channels? Are we probing to identify the additional needs of our customers or are we just clerking? Are we just serving one product at a time?"

Conducting a customer-satisfaction survey is quick and easy. A bank associate asks a customer to answer a series of survey questions using a personal digital assistant or PDA. The survey takes about 40 seconds to complete. At the end of each week, information gathered from the surveys is streamed via a secure Web link to Dotcomments' where it fulfills a Web-based report accessible only by Synovus Financial Corporation.

To obtain this information, a bank associate in each participating branch approaches a customer after the customer has completed a banking transaction. The banker asks the customer to take part in a brief survey, then hands over a PDA containing a series of questions. The survey takes about 40 seconds. The customer answers the last question and hands the PDA back to the associate. At the end of the week, the bank associate uploads the data from the surveys and streams it via a secure online connection to Dotcomments where the information fulfills a Web-based report.

Dotcomments' reporting system creates a series of reports that measure multiple areas of the customer's interaction, including encounters with specific bank employees. The information is immediately available for review by the Synovus team. Members of the corporate management team and each branch manager simply log on to the Internet to access the reports using Synovus' secure online account.

"You can see by branch and by team member how each one ranked," Mansour says. "It's a very dynamic reporting tool."

Evaluating the customer experience is only part of the service-improvement program at Synovus. Using fresh data from each week's customer surveys, the bank's branch managers conduct training sessions to address the service deficiencies identified in Dotcomments' reports. "Our training department partnered with the team at Dotcomments to develop an excellent training program," Mansour says.

Banking customers at Synovus Financial Corporation rarely decline the opportunity to lend their perspective to a customer-satisfaction survey. The information gathered in each weekly survey is used to create multiple reports measuring many areas of the customer's interaction, including encounters with specific employees.

"The value of the program is that it helps them execute on the specific service and sales behaviors that we know delight and satisfy customers on the frontlines," says Duncan Moore, a principal at Dotcomments. "In this regard, the InTouch system is unique because of the continuity it provides. So many other sales and service programs focus on training and coaching, but lack the 'follow-up' element that our system provides. With the InTouch system, the behaviors are more likely to 'stick' at the frontlines because of the tracking/measurement component."

The Dotcomments InTouch system is vastly superior to mystery shops and other traditional methodologies primarily because it surveys actual customers in real time directly at the point of service. The information obtained from a vast number of customers is far more valuable to a large, regional banking operation like Synovus than are the subjective opinions offered by mystery shoppers during a limited number of monthly visits.

Dotcomments is a consultancy that blends its unique methodology, training and software to enable today's retail service businesses to ensure consistent execution from the frontlines. Using PDAs and the Internet, the company develops communications programs that supply continuous, fresh and actionable information to its client base. Its turnkey solutions can be customized to provide each client with specific programs that will enable it to achieve its service-improvement and overall growth objectives.

"We switched from mystery shops to the InTouch system for several reasons," Mansour says. "First of all, we receive a lot more surveys. And when you conduct more surveys, you feel better about the data. That's just common sense. Secondly, we get the information more quickly than we did with mystery shops, so we can coach to it. When you get information two or three months past the date of the mystery shopper's visit, it's hard to coach to it. And, thirdly, it puts control of the survey instrument directly in the hands of our branch managers. This is, after all, a branch-driven program.

"In the first three months of operation, the InTouch system has exceeded our expectations," Mansour adds. "We're getting a lot more information now, we're getting it in a timely fashion and we're not spending any more than we did for mystery shops. We're also looking into further leveraging the cost by conducting other surveys on the PDA device."

Based on its experience with the InTouch system, Synovus Financial Corp. plans to expand Dotcomments' customer-satisfaction program to all branches during 2007.

"The real reward comes from driving your branch results, not learning how each individual teller scored on the surveys," Mansour says. "That's how we've grown so far, and that's how we'll grow in the future."

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