Do you still remember the local community banks that populated Ohio's small towns as recently as forty years ago? The ones where you and the tellers knew each other by name, where you opened your first savings account with three or maybe seven dollars you'd earned from delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, or babysitting for a neighbor, and the ones where casual conversations and smiles were the order of the day? Sadly, corporate banking has erased these events from our daily life and, for many, from our memories as well but this week we had the pleasure to discover that a renaissance in banking has begun at the Western Reserve Bank. Take a moment with us while President and CEO Ed McKeon gives us both a walk down memory lane and a look into the future of banking as he introduces us to Medina's hometown, community bank;
Western Reserve Bank opened it's doors on November 6, 1998. The bank was the idea of P. M. Jones our Chairman. He had a company here in town that was doing business with a big regional bank when, due to consolidation within the regional bank, many of Mr. Jones' customers began to experience difficulties with their accounts. He came to the conclusion that Medina needed a local bank that would answer to the community rather than a corporate office in a far away city. Networking with business and professional people throughout the community, he worked to determine the level of interest in a local, community bank and overwhelmingly he found that not only did his idea have broad support but potential investors began to identify themselves immediately as well.
The entire banking industry is designed to be very efficient and is focused on getting you in and out quickly. When we were starting this bank, we decided that we'd be the least efficient bank in town and we would do everything possible to make our customers feel welcome and appreciated. Our philosophy is to hire the best "people" people to provide an extreme level of customer service. An extreme level of customer service means that we have people answer our telephones instead of using automated answering equipment, we don't have ropes in our lobby, and we do provide free coffee and soft drinks for our customers along with fair pricing, fast decisions on loans, courier pick-ups for business deposits, and anything else we can think of to provide great banking services to the Medina community. I even send hand written thank-you notes to every customer who opens an account with us.
We're a community bank with a tremendous amount of expertise in business banking but we give the young man or woman with a hundred dollar savings account the same care and attention we give our corporate customers with a hundred thousand dollar accounts. We have checking and savings accounts, business loans, consumer loans, credit cards, and debit cards but we're not in the business of selling insurance, we're not selling annuities, we're not in the brokerage business. We're simply a community bank that gives our customers great service. Our customers are never charged a fee for using our ATM and we've purchased access to KeyBank's ATM network so all of our customers can go to any KeyBank ATM machine for free, too. We have Internet banking for our business customers but we've discovered that our customers prefer what we refer to as high touch rather than high tech and that they're more comfortable with our hand picked team of caring employees giving them the phenomenal level of service they've come to expect at Western Reserve Bank. If any customer has to wait at all, I'm up and talking to them and offering to get them a cup of coffee so they know that I'm concerned with the service they receive in our bank. What's happened here is that all of our employees have now taken on the same attitude and that has resulted in our established customers sending us a constant stream of new customers.
When we had only been open for five months, I wrote to all of our customers and asked if they would consider being a reference for us in one of the ads we were designing. An amazing forty-five percent of them wrote back saying they'd love to be listed as a reference in our ad so we had to design a full page ad just to hold all of their names. Any bank or any company can get a few customers to be references but we had hundreds and hundreds of customers who wanted to tell the world about the care they receive at Western Reserve Bank.
How we treat our customers and how they feel about us is a two way street. For example, one of our customers was always the first one to the bank on Saturday mornings. When I'd go over to open the door, I would always hold the door open for him and welcome him to the bank. One day he came up to me and asked if I realized that the way we treat our customers has motivated many of them to hold the door for others. It was becoming infectious! Now I had no idea how much money that man had in our bank and I didn't care but it turned out that his wife just happened to be the Chief Financial Officer of a company with a seven figure account at another bank. One day, this large, regional bank made some serious mistakes with this company's account and failed to provide them with the service they needed to rectify the situation. The owner of the company was absolutely furious and our customer's wife told him that her husband said that Western Reserve Bank really knows how to treat their customers well. The business owner decided to move their entire banking relationship to our bank and the entire chain of events was set in motion by me simply opening the door for her husband and saying, "Good morning!"
We've designed the bank to be a casual, friendly environment where our customers can feel relaxed and comfortable and we're more concerned with making the people on Main Street happy than we are with making the people on Wall Street happy. Our bank is decorated with art work that is furnished by The Medina County Art League who I met through my association with Bill Beal of Beal's Watercolors. Every two months, three or four of their artists come in and they change the art work and hold a show for our customers and visitors. Basically, we just give our customers the same type of service we would want if we were them.
In addition to the Western Reserve Bank's main office, they also operate locations at Camelot Place and The Western Reserve Masonic Community. While their approach to banking may sound like a trip down memory lane, I'm betting that they're actually showing us the wave of the future. Get the respect both you and your money deserve by stopping in at the Western Reserve Bank and don't forget to tell them that The Advocate sent you!
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