Daniel A. Mercurio
Title: Senior Vice President, Retail Banking, Cambridge Savings Bank
Age: 35
Experience: 12 years
Dan Mercurio started in retail banking immediately after college and he hasn’t looked back. He trained in a retail management development program at Fleet Bank and has since managed branches and districts of branches at Fleet, Wachovia and Sovereign Bank, now Santander. Most recently, he helped roll out a sales and service process across more than 700 branches at the recently rebranded Santander. Mercurio wasn’t actively seeking out another opportunity, but an executive search firm tracked him down and introduced him to Cambridge Savings Bank, where he now heads up the retail division from his post overlooking Harvard Square.
Q: How did your early days working in the branch help inform your later work?
A: While I was in the branch manager development program, I worked as a teller for several weeks in one of the busiest offices in downtown Boston. Early on, that’s when I had the most exposure to customers: working with them day to day in a branch, understanding their needs, understanding why they choose a bank, why they conduct their transactions a certain way. It helps you relate to customers.
You also learn an appreciation for the level of customer service you need to deliver, the relationships you need to build with customers and the importance of being able to lead a variety of employees with different backgrounds and different skill sets. I have an appreciation of the work our employees do, and I think it makes me a credible leader. Those formative years are years that I won’t forget.
Q: A couple of times you’ve mentioned “high-quality conversations” with customers – what do you mean by that?
A: I’ll use a service-to sales example. You have a customer who may come in to reorder a debit card because they lost their debit card. Typically, you would process that service request and make sure that request is handled quickly and confidently for the customer. This is taking the next step, so when you’re interacting in that service request, building up enough credibility with that customer and rapport where you can then say: “While you’re in here, I’d like to ask you a few questions about how you do your banking.” A simple question like that can really open up that conversation that then results in a back and forth dialogue around the customer’s preferred way of conducting transactions.
You then also look for other triggers that signal other potential financial services needs and turn what can be a service interaction into a conversation that revolves around the needs and goals of the client.
You might use some good open-ended questions, like “Tell me a little bit about your family,” or “How long have you lived in this area?” It’s really giving the customer the opportunity to share what’s on their mind and what keeps them up at night. Is it a daughter or son that is getting married in a year, is someone about to go off to college, is it the birth of a child they’re expecting? These are those life events or moments of truth, if you will, that we need to be there for as a bank.
Q: What kind of challenges and opportunities are you looking at in this new role?
A: There’s a lot of opportunity. One of the things I’ve been most impressed with is the field’s ability to provide very good customer service. We have the opportunity to do that even better and I go back to the concept of building relationships, not transactions, and we as a sales organization can operate more effectively, more productively, by working on the quality of the customer conversation that we have.
We want to grow our deposits, so we are at $1.7 billion in retail deposits, and we want to grow that significantly over the next five years. To do that, you need to attract new customers, and that means you need to be comfortable having those conversations with prospects who don’t bank with you in a way that makes them feel compelled to explore Cambridge Savings more as an institution.
We have an opportunity to do that, and part of that will be through a defined sales and service process that we’ll be rolling out by the end of Q1 of 2014.
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