TD Bank, Mary, and Harnessing Humanity In Marketing

I used TD Bank’s Penny Arcade coin counting service for over a decade. At first I paid the 8% non-customer fee, which seemed a small price for turning pocket-encumbering nickels and dimes back into more portable denominations. Later, I opened a TD savings account to accommodate the semi-annual fruits of my coin jar, and whatever foreign notes I had amassed in the same period. As silly as it sounds, my trips to TD were a happy little ritual.

If TD’s goal with the Arcade service was to acquire all of my banking business, it didn’t work. Despite Citibank’s frequent assaults on my humor, the pernicious switching costs that minimize share shifts in retail banking apply to me as others. Ironically, the thought of all the frustrating interactions with Citi that would be required to move bank and mortgage accounts, act as a deterrent. Still, TD landed me as a savings customer who might be nudged into higher-margin business areas, and advocacy, and it had earned the right to make money using my money.

Fast forward to a few months ago, when I ventured, coin-laden, into my local TD branch, only to find the Penny Arcade missing.

Google explained the disappearance. Hard-hitting investigative journalism from NBC had revealed that the machines short-changed customers by a percentage point or two, and upstanding legal minds saw an opportunity to generate a handful of lawsuits. TD’s scrapping the machines in response didn’t surprise me. I had always suspected a thorough cost-benefit analysis would show that the time spent by staff dealing with the machines — which needed frequent coin bag changes and other maintenance — probably barely justified the positive sentiment and incremental business they created. Add in a few million dollars in legal liabilities and the negative press, and it probably wasn’t a hard decision to eliminate them.

Still, a little nonplussed, I approached a branch employee. “What am I meant to do with my coins now?” I asked, jangling my rucksack. Rather than give me one of the many uncharitable answers that surely popped into his head, the guy apologized that the machine was gone, suggested the nearest location of a similar machine, and then added: “Or we can give you coin rolls and you can fill them up.” Gesturing to someone sitting quietly at a table behind us, he added: “Mary, would probably help you…”

The Mary to whom he was referring is a neighborhood woman I’ve known and chatted to for years, who is currently homeless. I sat down with her, and the coin rolls I’d been given, and tipped $200-plus in small change onto the table in front of us. Mary started firing coins into stacks with the dexterity of a Vegas croupier, outpacing me at least two-to-one in filling the rolls. At some point another employee, who had by then dealt with my foreign currency, joined in our counting and chatting. It was clear she knew Mary as well as I did, as did several other TD employees who came by to chat while we stacked. “Everyone knows you in here Mary,” I said. “Yes,” she said, “I help them out.”

I handed Mary a cut of the proceeds. I thanked the TD employees too, although maybe I didn’t make enough of a point of it, given that they blew me away with the way that they had not only befriended Mary, but made her feel like a part of their team. My visit could easily have been a futile, aggravating trip to a faceless financial institution that ‘knows’ me only as a few data points, and cares not a jot for my paltry business, let alone my community. Instead I experienced something that transcended good service and got all the way to the best of humanity: People caring for people because they’re people.

The TD employees had demonstrated such kindness that I started re-thinking the unwieldy mess of infrastructure, humans and process that is a big retail bank. It cut through my skepticism and teased a world in which banks might be a positive social force. Not just philanthropically, but organically. Not just by providing jobs, but by making people feel a part of something bigger and more important than a corporation.

Had TD done something to create this behavior that others might emulate, or was it a serendipitous accident that the bank had played host to? Intentionality seemed unlikely, because manufacturing a moment with this many variables would be almost impossible, and, well, it’s just not the sort of thing corporations do. (Just imagine the conversation with legal: “So, we’re going to ask a local homeless person to stand in for our coin counting machine…” There isn’t a ‘REJECTED’ stamp big enough.)

Can You Plan For Humanity?

Like a few others in its category, TD has embraced the ‘public space’ retail experience that Apple, most notably, has pioneered. Walls, screens, alcoves, oversize desks and other unwelcoming barriers that are suggestive of distance or secrecy have been replaced by open spaces, transparent materials and employees who walk up to greet people, rather than glumly await their arrival. Confusing banking jargon — while still in evidence — is tempered by splashes of concision and clarity in the bank’s content. There are a few wince-inducing stock images of people leading unattainably beautiful lives, but most of TD’s models could almost be you or I.

As you probably know, TD also unchained bank pens. A simple yet differentiating gesture. (The chained pen is an anachronistic hangover from a time when ink wells and the attendant pen were rare and expensive enough to be worth stealing.) For a period it gave away umbrellas. Some branches even offered free pizza, a very un-bank-like behavior.

Employee hiring and training practices in the last few years have focused on creating “legendary experiences.” Employee reviews of the training are (generally) positive, and customer satisfaction ratings, as collected and analyzed by organizations like JD Power, suggest that people who use TD (generally) feel good about it.

TD has also tried to put positive human interaction at the center of its communications. Under its ‘Bank Human Again’ platform it hasn’t only used the word ‘human’ — a word rapidly rendered meaningless by a mediocre marketer — but has actually supported and demonstrated humanity.

In 2015, in a campaign called ‘Make Today Matter,’ TD gave 24 customers in 24 cities, 24 hours to initiate projects that would benefit their local communities. TD employees selected the winners and gave them $30,000. A guy in Ontario made a ramp for his wheelchair-bound neighbor, so she could leave her house. A Philadelphia mother of eight, hosted a ‘Cinderella’ gala for foster girls to show them they’re beautiful.

Another campaign featured an Automatic Thanking Machine (ATM, obvs), that gave out real and highly personalized gifts to customers. The video of this effort has been viewed by 24 million.

Whether TD intentionally applied a ‘what will employees think/feel’ filter in planning these campaigns, I have no idea. But they involved employees, featured employees and operated as real world demonstrations of exactly the kind of ‘legendary experiences’ that TD training asks employees to deliver.

The focus of campaigns like these is most often the acquisition of new customers. Organizations rarely think about the need for external marketing to resonate internally, which is a big miss. Campaigns that feel authentic to employees, that involve them, that demonstrate the behavior they’ve been asked to demonstrate, and make them proud of their organization, have a greater impact than those that don’t. (I’m proud of the work my KBS friends and I did with Vanguard and Windstream in this respect.)

Marketing that lifts employee morale, and reminds people what great looks like at their organization, creates the type of behavior that attracts and retains customers — a marketing multiplier effect. I think we should all challenge ourselves to incorporate an employee lens in the process of planning any marketing effort.

So maybe TD can take at least a little credit for the heartwarming moment I experienced. Yes, the bank got lucky finding some New Yorker employees trained by life in this densely-packed city to interact with all kinds of people. But, unlike many organizations that would have drilled the humanity out of them (driving the anachronistic, false-dichotomy wedge between life and working life), they encouraged and even nurtured it. Whether it was entirely intentional or not, the physical spaces TD created, its training, and the marketing representation of the organization it aspires to be, created the conditions that allowed humanity to trump standard corporate behaviors.

Mary and I went back to TD last week. We were again greeted warmly, not just by the TD employee at the door, but by two senior members of staff who came over to say hello and check on our well being. After we were done with our coins — mine deposited in my account, Mary’s turned into a handful of notes (they waived the fee they normally charge for non-customers) — I asked Mary whether she’d ever thought of offering her service in another bank. “No,” she told me. “Last time I went into another bank they threw me out.”