Omnichannel in bank sales:
the branch is not the problem.

In bank sales, omnichannel rarely fails because of the app. It fails because the channels are counted against each other.

Hardly any sales strategy today gets by without the word. Branch, online journey, telephone, partners: customers should be able to choose, and the same bank should be waiting for them everywhere. As a target state, that is undisputed.

In practice, it often looks different. The customer starts online, calls, goes into the branch – and has to tell the story from the beginning three times. The adviser in the branch cannot see what the customer started in the portal the day before yesterday. And if the deal is closed online in the end, it is missing from the target of the branch that held the conversation.

That is not a technology problem. The systems can usually do more than is being used. It is a steering and leadership problem. And that is precisely why it can be solved with steering and leadership.

What omnichannel actually means

Having many channels is multichannel. Most banks have had that for years. Omnichannel means something else: the customer changes channel, and the advice carries on. No new questions, no new application, no feeling of having ended up at a different company.

Measured against this, the decisive question is not how many channels an institution operates. It is what happens at the transitions between them. That is where the customer experience is created – and where business is lost.

Three places where it gets stuck

The channels are measured against each other. Every channel has its own target, and a deal can only count once. So it counts where it was signed – not where the advice was given. Every branch manager knows the consequence: you do not send the customer online, even if it would be more convenient for them, because the business would then disappear from your own figures. As long as the target system is built like this, the channels work against each other, whatever the strategy says.

The handover has no owner. There is someone responsible for every channel. For the moment when the customer switches from one to the other, there usually is not. An online application that has been started, a callback request, an enquiry via a partner: who takes care of it, by when, and who can see it? If nobody can answer that straight away, this is exactly where the deal evaporates.

Partners are treated as suppliers, not as a channel. Anyone working with strong sales partners has a channel with its own customer access and its own logic. Treat it as a source of applications and that is exactly what you get: applications. Treat it as part of your own sales force, with clear routes into the branch and back, and you build lasting customer business.

What I bring to this from practice

I worked through the third point myself when building a B2B partner sales channel at a consumer finance bank, from 2007 to 2009. The most common mistake when setting up a partner channel is the standard contract: one connection model for everyone. That is why we built three – processed centrally, via the branch, and with decision-making freedom for the partner.

The “via the branch” model was the most instructive: the partner refers, the branch advises and closes, and the customer becomes an existing customer of the bank. This turned the partner channel into added value for the branch network instead of competition. Eight months after market launch, revenue through the channel stood at around EUR 20 million. The full story of the partner channel.

At the same institution, in the turnaround of the 36 branches, the lever was not more customer contacts but more products per customer: life insurance production almost doubled and credit protection insurance rose by 50 per cent, measured over nine months. At its core, that is the omnichannel question too: not more customers through more channels, but more from the customers you already have.

And a third experience belongs here: I come from bank sales and have nevertheless co-led IT projects twice, both times during the restructuring of a bank. In a recent discussion on LinkedIn about how sales and IT work together, we arrived at exactly this point: the customer does not care which system runs in the background. They only notice whether it works quickly, simply and transparently. Omnichannel therefore only succeeds if sales and IT build the transitions together – from the customer’s point of view, not the systems’.

What I look at in the first 90 days

Four interventions that cost little and quickly show whether an institution can steer across channels:

The target system. One rule that defines how a deal counts when several channels were involved. Whether double counting, splitting or allocation to the advising channel: what matters is that there is a rule and that every adviser knows it. Only then does the working against each other stop.

The handover points. I have the three to five most frequent channel switches mapped out, from the customer’s point of view, not the organisation chart’s. For every transition: one person responsible, one deadline and one place in the CRM where it can be seen.

A few key figures across channel boundaries. Products per customer, penetration of the existing customer base, closing rate per advisory conversation – measured across all channels, not per channel. I have described in more detail which figures really steer an institution on the page on sales steering.

The role of branch management. In omnichannel sales that works, branch management is not the defender of its own location but the host for all channels in its region. That is a leadership task, not a systems topic. If it succeeds, the dense branch network is no longer a cost block but the advantage that pure digital banks cannot copy.

And AI?

The question comes up in every discussion about the future of retail banking, most recently in an exchange on LinkedIn about whether classic retail banking has come to an end. My answer there was clear, and it applies here just the same: retail banking will change disruptively, but it will not disappear. It will be different. For regional banks in particular, there is an opportunity in this, because their greatest strength has always been the personal relationship.

AI delivers information, analyses and occasions for contact. It takes preparation off the adviser’s hands and gives them time back. What they do with that time is what counts: a structured conversation about goals, plans and wishes, and just as much about worries, fears and hardships. For omnichannel, this means: the digital channels do not replace advice, they prepare it.

This requires two things that are missing from many channel concepts: consistent training and low turnover in customer relationship management. An adviser who supports families over years, and ideally over generations, cannot be replaced by any algorithm. With AI at their side, they become stronger. Technology does not make the adviser superfluous. It makes them more valuable.

Three questions for your institution

First: if a customer is advised in the branch and then closes online – who does the deal count for?

Second: who is responsible when an online application is abandoned – and how does that person find out about it?

Third: are there shared sales targets that the channels can only achieve together? And if so: by which key figures are they measured, in what way and how often?

If the answers in sales differ from those on the board, that in itself is the result. And it can be changed without a single line of software.

→ To the sales check: twenty statements, four minutes, no registration

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