And the final ten branches were profiled as "traditional centers", which are the banks that we are all used to, they provided typical banking services but also had newer technology and were presented in a more contemporary style.
Upon entering one of the branches a friendly host greets you and directs you to where you need to go. They set up computers at an "investment bar", where customers could do their banking, check portfolios, or even surf the web. They set up comfortable couches, provided free coffee, and stocked several financial magazines. If there was a wait to see an available teller, clients could watch the news and the stock ticker on televisions.
They achieved many rewards from their experiments, it sparked a surge in creative thinking for branch banking. Customer satisfaction improved greatly and they even attracted new customers. But the experimentation also came with its problems such as the customers becoming confused by new procedures and the employees stressed with learning new ways of banking. Tellers spent 30% to 50% of their day in meeting discussing new techniques and since the tellers were always in meeting the bank had to sometimes had to bring in temporary employees which caused even more confusion. Problems arose with incentive plans, since the tellers had new tasks to handle besides helping customers they didn't receive their percentage of sales. So a new incentive plan was introduced where there were set incentives and fluctuating incentives, some welcomed this idea and some detested it, which caused even more problems. One major problem with the experiments was that the employees and the customers acted differently because they knew that they were being studied like lab rats. They also had problems with capacity for new customers and capacity for the number of new procedures the tellers could handle.
After the 90-day trial period there was only a 10% failure rate for the new procedures, the team expected 30% so the experiment was successful.
