Post 10 Reputation

Last summer, I interned in a Chinese bank as a lobby manager. In general, I was responsible for distributing customers into different service lines. Sometimes, I also needed to provide the financial service for clients. Since I looked very young and inexperienced, it was hard for me to earn clients’ trust at the very beginning. It is quite often for clients to question me how old are you? How long have you been working here? Once they realized that I was just an intern student, the conversation was over immediately. Situations became worse and worse, I had to think about how to build up my reputation with clients. Hence, I started to observe customer reaction when I communicated with them.

During one-week observation, I found out many interesting things that helped me to understand customers’ needs and tail the right investment plan for them. To illustrate, the elderly customers would like you to ask their family situation first such as children education and health issue since those were their biggest concerns. If I started the conversation by asking “how is going with your family? Is everyone doing ok?”, they would suddenly felt very close to me and started to talk about the issues brought them to me. For middle age clients, they prefer to know your expertise and academic background before they consult financial service from you. My best strategy to establish a reputation with this group client was telling clients that I studied in the top university of America and major in accounting. Naturally, they started to trust my capability of conducting professional financial service.

Through this work experience, I learned that it was important to show your clients that you do care their personal interests and needs before performing any service. Additionally, I also built up self-confidence and communicative skills while dealing with a number of clients every day, which would help me demonstrate a long-term relationship with clients in the future. Moreover, in order to continually improve my reputation, I started to learn all the financial products provided by our bank by asking managers. And then, I also collected the information of similar financial products provided by other banks. I could easily tell the advantages and disadvantages of each products providing by our bank and explained clearly to my clients of other banks’ financial product performance. Later on, no on questioned my ability to conduct financial service since I have full knowledge of information clients want to know.

Personally, I really could not come up with some examples about giving up a reputation for some immediate gains. However, this reminded my junior high school teacher’s example. My teacher began to establish a fair and incorrupt reputation at the first class when he gave an introduction. He told us that told your parents do not give me gifts or money in order to ask me special care of you guys, such as giving more opportunities to join the competitions or more generous grading. (I have to say this type of behavior is quite common in China). Normally, students could only join some major competitions by teacher’s recommendation. If the teacher consistently treats students very bad, such as intentionally punish students hardly when he is late a little bit or bad handwriting homework. This is the signal for both students and their parents to send gifts to bribe the teacher in exchange for nicer attitude or treatment. After his long speech, we really thought he was an integrity teacher, and treat students in a fair manner. However, it turned out this was a joke. We should understand his speech in a reciprocal way. There was a time the whole school needed to denote money to people suffered earthquake disaster. (Implicitly, the principal teacher could get a bonus if his class donate most money than the other class did.) Thus, every principal teacher was actively encouraging the whole class to donate as much as possible. He prepared a donation box in front of the class, every student lined up and put money into the box one by one. He stood right next to the donation box. He would monitor how much money each student donates, and remembered the students who did not donate considerable money. Later on, he would always take a chance to punish those students, for example, he criticized one guy in the whole class just because he asked neighbors one question in class. (Note: We are not allowed to talk with other students during the class.) And he called guy’s parents came to school and kept saying this student is very naughty, does not respect him etc. Not just this student, all other students who did not donate considerable money all got punishment. One day, when our principal teacher came into the class, he did not criticize this guy anymore instead he appraised this student’s performance and asked the rest of class need to learn from him. Everyone was confusing why our teacher changed his attitude dramatically. Later on, this guy told us his parents bought a lot of gifts and send to the teacher. Personally, I really despised this kind of behavior. As a teacher, his primary job is to educate students not bully students. Hence, I think this is an example that sacrifice reputation for the short-term gain.