Wells Fargo Eyes Future to Restore Customer Trust and Brand Loyalty

Since Tim Sloan became CEO of Wells Fargo in October, his primary mission is to restore trust and pride in the company. What’s more, he is focusing on the company’s retail banking compensation program to instill greater employee engagement and, in turn, more effective customer engagement and brand loyalty.

Back in October, Sloan addressed Wells Fargo team members in Charlotte and addressed the sales practice issues “that have so clearly harmed our company’s reputation over the past several weeks. I want to say we’re sorry for the pain you have experienced as team members as a result of our company’s failures. Our senior leadership is committed — and I am personally committed — to taking the decisive actions and to learning the necessary lessons to ensure our company and our customers are never susceptible to the kinds of behaviors and failures that got us to where we are today. My primary objective is to restore trust in Wells Fargo — restore pride in our company and mission. That may seem like a long way off today, but I promise you we will.”

Since October, Sloan has engaged all company stakeholders.

“We want them to know that at our core our company and you — our team members — are not the people and company that has been portrayed in the news and social media,” he said. “However, we are also going to make sure they know that we are not in denial about our reality. Things went wrong. Problems need to be fixed. Customers and team members were harmed and need to be cared for. And a better and stronger Wells Fargo must emerge out of all of this.”

Sloan noted the following:

There are things that need to be fixed within our culture. There are weaknesses within it that we must change.
There are ways in which we behaved and did business that did not serve our customers, or our team members, or our investors or the many institutions and communities that rely on us to get things right.

That is not an easy thing to say, especially for a company with a long history of success as ours. But if my top priority as CEO is to restore the trust we’ve lost, then I also need to make it safe to talk about the problems that got us here — no matter where they began, no matter where their responsibility lies.

Sloan promises a Return to Greatness for Wells Fargo.

During last week’s fourth-quarter earnings call, Sloan talked about the recent launch of the company’s new retail banking compensation program.

“This has been a top priority over the past few months and it is a significant step in reinforcing to our retail banking team members what is expected of them, how their actions connect to our business priority of serving our customers, and how they'll be rewarded for performance against these expectations,” he explained.
Sloan cited five key principles to the new plan:

There are no product sales goals which we previously ended in October.

Second, we will gauge success based on customer service, increases in primary customers, household relationship growth and risk management, and not on opening new accounts.

Third, this new plan includes a strong focus on team performance with metrics heavily weighted toward team and branch goals, not just individual goals.

Fourth, we have stronger controls in place to monitor behavior and ensure we’re doing things the right way, including more proactive monitoring at the regional and corporate levels.

We will be closely monitoring results for any unintended outcomes or behaviors prompted by the new plan and we will make changes as needed.

“It will take time to communicate the plan and train thousands of team members so they understand the changes to successfully achieve new objectives,” Sloan said. “We’re also leveraging a number of new business success metrics, including primary customer growth, which measures the growth of customers that use Wells Fargo as their primary financial institution, and household relationship balanced growth to measure how Wells Fargo satisfy the broad financial needs of our customers.”

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