The Safe Deposit Box

Curious to what a safe deposit has to offer?

     Well, at the bank we have a variety of safe deposit boxes. They are in a variety of sizes and you can find them at most of our branch locations. 

     Most people use them to keep papers safe in the instance of a house fire or robbery. They are also commonly used for special, expensive (either by dollar-value or sentiments) small items such as jewels or artifacts.

     The boxes are located within our master vault and can only be accessed during bank business hours. To get to the boxes we have just implemented a hand-scanner.   
     The bank money is located in a separate section of the vault, so, with our open bank layout, you can just walk up the vault and scan your hand like James Bond after you enter a pin code and walk right in.
     Once inside, you must have one of the two keys we issue when signing the lease for the box. If you lose both keys, then we can drill the box open with a charge. 
     

The Newest Member of the Money Family

The most colorful currency we have!

     United States currency is an amazing thing. The first coin was actually developed by a relative of mine, David Rittenhouse. Since then, our currency has evolved a lot. There are a lot of security features embedded in each coin and bill. Some of these features aren't known by many and create some good party tricks.

     Let's look at the newest bill. The $100 bill that was released in early October of this year:

• Watermark portrait of Benjamin Franklin in the blank space to the right of the visible portrait. The image can be seen in the light from the front and the back
• Blue security thread runs to the left of the visible portrait that says "USA" and "100." The thread also turns pink with ultraviolet light
• Tilt the front of the bill to see the gold "100" in the right bottom corner turn to green
• Benjamin Franklin's clothes have raised texture on his right shoulder
• The bank of the bill has "100" printed very largely to help the visually impaired
• Benjamin Franklin's jacket collar, watermark area, and along the golden quill have micro-printing. With a magnified glass, you can see small words and numbers
• The golden quill is marked with phrases from the Declaration of Independence 
• The bills are printed in Washington D.C. and Fort Worth in Texas. Bills printed in Fort Worth have a small "FW" on the front top left corner

Caring to Keep Customers

The worth of a customer

     Customers are extremely important in all sorts of businesses and organizations.

On average:

• A customer with a complaint will tell 9-10 people about it.
• A customer with a complement will tell only 5 people about it.
• For every complaint to the Headquarters, 19 other dissatisfied customers don't bother to complain.
• A customer with one bad experience needs 12 good experiences to overcome it.
• It costs 5-10 times more to obtain a new customer than it does to keep an existing one

Keeping that information in mind, it is vital to continue to please customers. Here are some of the things we do to ensure a good time is had by all:

• Customer Appreciation Day. We dedicate a Friday in June to simply appreciating out customers. We have food and giveaways all day long and decorate each branch in a bank wide theme. 
• Respond to all social media. When someone writes to us or tags us in social media, we always respond whether its a complement, complain, or a question! We love hearing from you.
• Always pick the phone up in 3 rings. We will dash and sprint to the phone if we hear it ringing. We always pick it up within 3 rings and never let a computer try to answer your questions. Real people for real customers.
• Listen. We know you have stories to tell and we will listen. Whether it has to do with financials or personal life, we are hear for you. 
• We love feedback. No matter your opinion on your experience with us, we would love to hear it. We are always open to suggestions to make your experiences better.
• Ask us questions. We will answer all of your questions. If we don't have an answer, we will find you one. 
• We are family. We want you to feel comfortable when you come in. If you tell us a story about your dog one day, we want to be able to recognize you and then ask you how Spot is doing. We are all about relationships

Here is a video about how Columbia Business makes a video about how to keep customers happy.

(source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePMJ05L49R4) 

Location, location, location

"This looks like a hotel lobby!"

     Working on the teller line, comments about how the inside of our bank looked were constant. At our newest location, outside of Bangor, we tried a new layout of the bank floor plan and I think we hit success. 
     For those of you who haven't visited this Bumble Bee location, let me describe its unique features to you. 

• We have pods. Instead of one straight teller line counter, we have three "pods." Each pod holds two tellers and the three pods are lined up behind each other. The first two are primarily for walk-in customers and the last is for the three drive-thru lanes. This design encourages customers to walk right up to us and even behind us. We can easy turn out computer screens to show you exactly what we are doing if there are any questions.
• We have ECRs. As mentioned in a previous post, we use three ECRs in addition to our vault. There is an ECR at each pod to assist the teller in counter, accepting, and giving back money.
• We have a Kids Corner. In addition to our "living room," where there is a large television, couches, chairs, and magazines to browse while waiting for service, we have a separate area with leather couches, a large television playing cartoons, and an Xbox for kids to enjoy while their parents are meeting with loan officers or doing their regular banking. 
• We have hand scanners. Like many other banks, we have safety deposit boxes in our vault (separate from where we keep the money) that people can rent from us to keep their special belongings. BUT, our unique feature is that you don't need to be escorted into the vault like normally, you can get in by typing in your ID number and placing your hand on a scanner. And since there is not one big teller counter preventing you from getting to the vault, you can literally walk right up to the vault and go right in.
• We have a touchscreen monitor. In the lobby, next to the downstairs coffee bar, is a touchscreen monitor with access to all of our account descriptions, interest information, and the ability to log into your account if you need to.
• We have a coin machine. Most banks either do not accept unrolled coins or need to use a coin machine in the back of the vault. This bank has an easy-to-use coin counter that customers and non-customers can use. This machine provides excitement to people of all ages!
• Giving back to the community. Most of the daily banking takes place on the ground floor. But, upstairs is primarily for the community and our Business Services department. There are two conference rooms and one large Community Room that is free of charge for any community organization to use. There are full bathrooms upstairs (including showers) and a full kitchen to use too. Each conference room holds up to 20 people and is equip with comfortable chairs, a large table, a large television screen able to connect to any laptop, free wireless internet, and access to our coffee bar. Our Community Room can hold up to 75 people with individual leather armed chairs that have individual movable desktops, three large television screens able to connect to laptops, a private coffee bar, wireless internet, and a view of the city.

     Bumble Bee Bank prides itself on the satisfaction of really giving back to the community. The bank does not belong to a couple of owners, but it belongs to the customers. The unique layout provides an efficient and unique layout that truly engages customers.

 The teller line and the pods

The touch screen

The living room

Where Did All My Money Go So Fast?!

Ever check your bank account at the end of the month and wonder how in the world you could have spent so much money in the past few weeks?

     Bumble Bee Bank has just launched its new online Spending Plan and Money Manager services, available through the mobile app and the website. 
     I know from experience that expenses such as car, mortgage, and student debt payments or cellphone, internet, and cable bills stack up and it feels like the money I worked so hard so flies past my eyes and into someone else's hands. 

     The Spending Plan creates a realistic budget individualized to meet your specific lifestyle. The plan works by suggesting spending categories that most people use, such as entertainment, online services, gasoline, electronics, healthcare, and miscellaneous expenses. With those categories in mind, you can customize your own categories and designate an amount you are able to spend on each for either a week or month's time. 

     Every time you use your debit or credit card attached to the plan, Bumble Bee Bank will organize the purchase into its belonging category. It is also possible to manually enter the purchase into the correct category. Once each purchase or expense is paid, the target amount left in each category decreases. You can view your progress as an overview of the budget or in specific categories. This is an example of what my overview budget looked like in August:

     The Money Manager works in sync with the Spending Plan. All expenses and purchases are categorized and put into a pie chart to get a visual sense of where your money goes.

Insta-pay With Bill Pay

Would you like to pay your bills instantly?

     Banks have the goal of creating a captive audience. By designing an app to satisfy all of your money needs, we can assure you that all of your information will be safe and secure in one place. 
     From 2010 to 2013, there was a percentage increase from 62% to 69% concerning the online and mobile payments made on biller sites. Generation Xers and Yers, people born after the Baby Boomers and until 1994, are increasingly turning away from the mail and to electronic devices to pay their bills.
    The challenge that bankers face today is to get customers to use a bank BillPay system rather than a direct company payment. Some claims for turn offs are:

• "People don't like to "hunt all over the internet" to find their bills
• Younger people are lazy and don't like banks
• Mobile makes it harder, not easier, to get consumers to pay bills at a bank (vs. biller) site

     I can tell you, after working with numerous frazzled customers, that Bumblee Bee Bank has one of the simplest and safest BillPay apps available. To set up a relationship between the company and the bank, all you need to do is select the company genre or search for the company's name, then accept the confirmation email. After that you can choose to manually select payments or set up an automatic withdraw at your convenience.
     Younger people will fall in love with this app once they try it. Having car, rent, insurance, electricity, internet, phone, and cable bills in one easy place makes them hard to forget! Everything at your fingertips 24/7 makes no excuses to let anything slide!
   

I'll Be the Teller of Tellers

"Welcome to Bumble Bee Bank, how may I help you?"

     As a customer with valuable money, I bet you pay at least a little attention to the gal or guy that takes your money, gives you money, or you trust to pay your mortgage. Working at a bank being a "teller," since I was 18 years old with a tall figure, blonde hair, blue eyes, and a goofy wide smile has earned me some skeptical looks and questions when I am handed a check for $50,000 to apply to 3 loans, a mortgages, and a deposit. I got the feeling that I was not completely trusted to handle such a task, but little did they know that those were more or less the simple transactions.

     Many people do not realize the responsibilities that a "teller" has accumulated over the last handful of years. The reason I put quotation marks around the word is because that hardly describes the job at all. My title was a Financial Services Specialist, level One.

I could deposit checks into checking accounts, IRAs, HSAs, savings accounts, money market accounts; 
I could apply checks to mortgages, overdraft, home equity, line of credit, personal loans, auto loans, credit cards, collateral loans; 
I could cash checks for cash, withdrawals, Treasurer's Checks, money orders; 
I could do coin orders and cash change orders in any variety of variations; 
I could deposit your cash into any of the accounts or loans mentioned before or turn it into a check; 
I could encode personal checks, withdrawal tickets, or deposit tickets for you with the appropriate numbers; or 
I could help you turn your buckets and buckets of coin into dollar bills. And those were just the straight forward tasks.

     The slightly more difficult tasks would be working with our commercial lenders and mortgage specialists to cut closing checks, vendor checks, and applying new restrictions to accounts.

     Don't forget about all the personal relations we encounter every single day. Customers come in with questions about their account activity, the variety of products we offer, changes of address, reordering checks, broken or lost debit cards, "hot carding" and "warm carding" stolen and lost cards, disputing charges on the account, forgetting their online passwords, forgetting their pins, trying to cash checks for family or friends, and more financial questions you could possibility think of.

   The next component of working on the front line is probably the biggest. Security. Both with the physical money and the account information/protection. On the paperwork side, we need to determine what checks needs holds and how that process works, we complete the necessaries when large amounts of cash come in, and we have to file and order all signature cards and make sure they match your identity. The physical security measures are probably quite obvious with our ginormous vault, safety deposit boxes, ATM vault, night drop vault, and numerous audits of counting our money every day.

     Technology has played a big part in how we do things nowadays though. Now Bumble Bee bank has ECRs which are kinda like little vaults that usually two tellers share each. The ECR can take the money, sort it, count it, or give you the exact denominations we ask for. It's an amazing tool for us to use and it makes it a lot more difficult to rob!