Placing customers first. Customer engagement. Seeking to meet and satisfy customers’ financial goals. These are all key endeavors for Wells Fargo.
Wells Fargo Chairman, President, and CEO John Stumpf delivered these and other strategic customer experience goals during Tuesday’s Goldman Sachs U.S. Financial Services Conference.
“While it is our simple vision, we want to satisfy all our customers’ financial needs and help them succeed financially, it is fundamental to what has enabled Wells Fargo to manage through a variety of economic cycles in interest rate environments over the years,” Stumpf said. “Few companies in any industry have made progress toward an unchanging vision for decades and this vision will guide us toward continued growth for decades to come. While our vision hasn’t changed, our strategic priorities reflect the challenges and opportunities in today’s environment, which help us to continue to execute on the vision.”
Putting its customers first: “We need to understand our customers’ financial objectives so we can help them succeed financially,” Stumpf said. “Growing revenue, revenue growth has been challenging in the current environment, but we continue to benefit from our diversified business model. Managing expenses, we are focused on managing our expenses as we continue to invest for growth, especially for the long-term. Living our vision and our values. A clear vision is the foundation for a strong culture with our team members focused on doing the right thing helping our customers succeed.”
Stumpf focused his remarks on the Wells Fargo company culture that provides an atmosphere of constant customer engagement.
“You’ve read a lot and probably heard a lot recently about culture,” he explained. “Every morning, 265,000 of us get up and the reason we go to work is to serve customers, the result is we make money. We never put the stagecoach in front of the horses. It’s a culture where we work together, we tend to favor plural 
pronouns us, we and ours, over possessive pronouns I, me, and mine. Not that I, me, and mine are not important, but never at the cost of the us. And if I look back over my 30-plus years with the company, if I look at the one thing I think is most responsible for our success, it’s our culture.”
What’s more, Stumpf said people are not considered and never called employees at Wells Fargo.
“We think of each other as team member assets to be invested in, and it will always be that way at our company,” he explained. “Our customers are considered our guest, our customers we never think of them as counterparties.”
Serving communities well is a top goal, Stumpf said.
“We support the real economy in many ways, enabling people to buy new homes,” he said. “For example since 2012, we have helped over 8,000 low- to moderate-income families and individuals become homeowners through a NeighborhoodLIFT program. We also are lending money to businesses both large and small. We are the No. 1 one lender to mid-sized corporations and have been the nation’s No. 1 small business lender in dollars for 12 consecutive years. We strengthened our communities in many other ways as well. Our team members donated a record $98 million to community non-profits in 2014, up nearly 10% from a year ago and Wells Fargo has been named United Way’s No. 1 workplace giving campaign for the last five consecutive years.”
Stumpf said the key to mobile is integrating it with the company’s other channels.
“Customers who combine their use of online in mobile with our stores have a 70% higher purchase rate of our customers who only interact with either online or mobile alone,” he explained. “By focusing on our customers’ financial needs, we have grown market share and our market leaders across many of our customer key products.”