First off, I believe that many customers want all three TO SOME DEGREE, but want one much more than the others.

There are some underlying demographics at play here. Older consumers (>50) tend to want the interpersonal connection. Younger, less affluent consumers are looking for objective help w/ their financial decisions.

And the Crankys like me just want the bank to not mistakes, make it easy to do business, and leave us alone (p.s. thanks to a press release announcing a new position I have, in the past 24 hours I’ve received 2 phone calls from one bank — one from the wealth mgmt group, and one from the private banking group, soliciting my business. That kind of “left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing” makes us Crankys go crazy).

Anyway, the funny thing is that this isn’t the argument I wanted to get into — instead, that whatever the segments, whatever the needs, consumers have EXPECTATIONS — and if I were running the bank, I’d be more interested in knowing what those expectations were, and how well we were meeting them. Asking them “will you refer us?” does NOT give me answers to those questions.