Banking with a smile

Many banks claim to desire a strong, personal relationship with their customers and the communities around them, but very few of them can actually boast hosting community yoga classes, The Stitch and Bitch knitting club and movie nights in their facilities after hours. Portland, Ore.'s Pearl District Umpqua Bank, a subsidiary of Umpqua Holdings Corp., has taken a giant step away from the current impersonal, quick turnover mode of banking, back toward the more personal style, which focuses as much on providing good customer service as it does on money transactions.

Umpqua and its Portland-based design team, consisting of ZIBA, a design and branding consultancy firm, and Thompson, Vaivoda & Associates Architects Inc. (TVA), conducted a six-week branding and design development study before they began the process of designing the new bank branch. Most of their research explored the bank's target market and what it desired in a bank.

The research showed that people have grown skeptical and distrustful of big banks. Some people are also tired of being given a lower status by banks, based on the amount of money in their accounts. Many customers are unhappy, too, with the electronic banking influx of the digital age. They would rather interact with a teller than with an ATM machine.

Based on the results of the research, Umpqua saw an opportunity to present a friendly, client-focused banking experience to the Portland area. Keeping in mind that Umpqua was originally founded to help farmers and other "little guys" cash checks and take out loans when bigger banks denied them, Steve McCallion, ZIBA's creative director, tapped into the bank's "underdog mentality" to meet the needs of its target market.

When thinking about the bank's design, ZIBA's project manager for the new location, David Hawkins, says, "It is about creating a place where people want to linger." (Hawkins has since become vice president and brand manager at Umpqua Holdings Corp.) In order to make the space enticing enough to people that they would want to remain in the bank after they finished conducting their business, Hawkins hung signs inviting people to "sip, surf, read, bank." He also placed a large-screen plasma television just inside the store-front-sized windows in an effort to attract people in from outside.

The Pearl District Umpqua is 3,100 sq. ft., but the teller area and associate desks do not take up the majority of the space as they do at other banks. The tellers are hidden around a corner in the very back of the new bank unit so the atmosphere is less confrontational and intimidating.

The teller row is partitioned not by walls but by lamps, to make the area more intimate. The area where the tellers sit is on a lower level than where the customer stands. Money is counted on the teller's surface and handed up to the customer on an old-fashioned money tray with a gold-wrapped chocolate coin. McCallion says the reason for the service tray, height difference and complimentary coin is to focus on personal interaction and catering to customers as hotels did in the '50s.

The hotel metaphor extends to the concierge-style "Serious About Service" (SAS) desk in the center of the bank as well. The bank's "universal associates" who occupy the desk answer questions about accounts and services, bank hours, community relations and a variety of other concerns so that the tellers only have to be responsible for handling money.

In addition to concentrating heavily on customer satisfaction, Pam Saftler, TVA's project architect for the Pearl location, says, "We wanted to take the focus off the teller transactions and put it more on merchandising." Thus, TVA and ZIBA designed the bank so that customers walk in and encounter a lounge area and an Internet café first. The design then forces customers to walk through the entire bank and experience the merchandise before they reach the tellers. There are modules set up displaying coffee, mugs, water bottles, hats, Visa gift cards and even the different types of accounts available at the bank. Saftler says the bank is designed more like a retail store than a traditional bank, and "the tellers are in the back of the store, kind of like the milk in a grocery store." The cork flooring makes browsing easier, too, because it is quieter and more comfortable underfoot than the typical marble or tile found at traditional banks.

Umpqua Bank currently has 97 locations in the Northwest region, from Sacramento to Seattle. Because the people in the Pearl District responded enthusiastically to Umpqua's community focus and unique design, President David Edson, CEO Ray Davis and designer, Hawkins, have begun designing additional new units in the Pearl District style. They plan to open 10 new locations next year. They are also trying to remodel existing units so they fit into the brand signature that has been created, but Hawkins says that is a longer and slightly more difficult process. There are currently about 18 stores still needing to be "Umpquatized," and as the new design rolls out to more and more branches, says Hawkins, he hopes the communities around them will be "Umpquatized," too.