Finance Committee on June 12th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Sorry. Ms. Blanchet, go ahead.

[Lucie Blanchet]

Our client service representatives do not have sales objectives.

[Andrew Auerbach]

In the case of BMO, to reinforce the balanced approach to the objectives, certainly we have objectives around customer experience measurements, around risk, around the behaviours, and around performance.

Just to build on this idea from a CSR perspective, to answer your question specifically, what we try to do is provide tools to our CSRs to help them have great conversations with the customer. To give you a sense of the gambit, oftentimes, or about half of the time, these are actually more service oriented. These are milestone recognitions, perhaps celebrating a significant anniversary of dealing with our company. It really is grounded in deepening the customer experience with our customers who, as you know, very often are mostly dealing with our CSRs.

[Raj Grewal, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

The issue I have with this, which I brought up in the first round of testimony too, is that if you put a guy such as me in as a teller in my neck of the woods, my sales target would be through the roof just because of my ability to interact with people from my community, my ability to speak in their native tongue, and my ability to convince them of what they do not need.

In my experience, when I go to branches, especially in new communities where they have a high population of immigrants or small business owners who might be very successful in the business they know in terms of construction, landscaping, or trucking, but aren't very savvy when it comes to what to do with their money, that's where we're having a big issue, at a branch level, in terms of the CSR, or the teller, or the client adviser.

I go back to you, Kirk, to RBC. When you say “client adviser”, is that the regulated adviser or the unregulated advisor, the difference between the “o” and the “e”?

[Kirk Dudtschak]

That is the “or” advisor, and that is the title we use consistently across RBC, regardless of whether it's wealth management. In most cases, wealth management or the bank, we really don't differentiate between the two spellings because every employee in every role is held accountable to not only our code of conduct, but a set of skills and behaviours that relate to their job type.

[Raj Grewal, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

The problem there is this: If you say that a guy who is a mutual fund advisor, who has a CSC and has the education—

[Kirk Dudtschak]

Right.

[Raj Grewal, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

—maybe has an MBA, at a minimum a BBA or a commerce degree, plus the security regulations—as opposed to somebody at the front line, who is still called an “advisor”, now you can see clear as day how those two “advisors” are not at the same level.

[Kirk Dudtschak]

It's in the context of their role as a “client advisor”, the things that they're going to be providing advice around. They may be providing advice around how to do your day-to-day banking on your mobile phone, or online, and teaching you and enabling you to do that.

In fact, we had an 85-year-old client at our annual meeting reference that exact point. He valued the fact that they were teaching him how to do banking in today's world. It could be the travel insurance example. Or it could be an example of something that they don't have the skills for, to provide the deep advice. They're then encouraged to introduce that client to an advisor who can do a better job of uncovering the needs and the goals of the client and recommending different options to achieve those goals. We would never ask our client advisor to recommend something they were not qualified to do.

[Raj Grewal, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

But you could see how a customer would mistake the two—

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Last question.

[Raj Grewal, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

—and say, “Oh, you're an advisor.” With that, working at a bank carries a certain level of cachet, as opposed to somebody who has the educational and institutional knowledge of actually providing investment advice.

I know all of the people on the bank side, and I don't want to pick on the banks, because as a politician I'm very much called a company man from time to time and I drink the Kool-Aid just as everybody else does, but I want to say this. From a customer perspective, a very objective perspective, if you're walking into a bank and somebody at the tell is giving you investment advice...and the only point here is that they look at your financial profile on their screen and say, “You should speak to X, have you ever thought of doing y?”

I humbly suggest it is not within their expertise to suggest that to a customer, because they don't know that customer's financial profile to that extent, and they shouldn't be making that type of recommendation. That's one man's opinion.

I'll defer to the Chair and I think my time is up.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Yes, your time is up, but we'll defer to the witnesses if they have anything to add.

[Kirk Dudtschak]

Nothing to add. We would never put our employees in a situation where they were providing advice around something they weren't trained to do, or qualified to do, or comfortable doing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Heads are nodding, so everyone agrees at that end.

Mr. Liepert.

[Ron Liepert, Conservative, Calgary Signal Hill, AB]

I'm glad Mr. Grewal ended up at the very end saying it was his own singular opinion, because if we listen to Mr. Grewal here, you're all crooks.

[Raj Grewal, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

I didn't—

[Ron Liepert, Conservative, Calgary Signal Hill, AB]

Do any of you believe you have a service or a product that nobody wants? I think I heard Mr. Grewal say something along the lines that you're trying to sell a product that nobody wants. Do any of you believe you're selling a product that nobody wants?

[Raj Grewal, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

I don't think I said that.

[Ron Liepert, Conservative, Calgary Signal Hill, AB]

Presumably, you're selling a product or upselling a product that somebody may want. Anyway, I get very tired of Liberals trying to save the world. But we'll go on.

I'd like to ask each one of you whether—

[Some hon. members]

[Inaudible--Editor]

[Ron Liepert, Conservative, Calgary Signal Hill, AB]

Well, you're even worse.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Ron Liepert, Conservative, Calgary Signal Hill, AB]

I'd like to ask each one of you—and maybe you can't answer this question—on an annual basis, how many employees would you dismiss for doing something that would cross the line? Maybe it's fraudulent, maybe it's totally inappropriate, maybe it's consistently trying to sell something that nobody wants. Would it be fewer than five? Would it be five to 10? Would it be 10 to 50? Give me an idea on average, annually, how many employees you have discovered crossing the line.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

You may not have the numbers. You can send them to us if you don't. Who wants to start?

Mr. Dudtschak.