Content area
Full Text
Overseeing MidSouth Bank's ombudsman program, Marcia Angelle helps educate and assist customers in this tough economy
The last four years certainly don't qualify as good times for many Americans. Thousands of people are struggling to stay afloat financially. However, the downturn has given community banks an opportunity to forge tighter bonds with their communities by helping their customers weather the economic storm.
That's just what Marcia Angelle, a collections supervisor at MidSouth Bank in Lafayette, La., is trying to do. As the 2008 financial crisis dragged down the U.S. economy and unemployment rose to 10 percent, Angelle and her colleagues at the $1.4 billion-asset community bank noticed that more people were depending on the bank's automatic overdraftaccount protection program to avoid bounced checks. But they also noticed those customers were paying recurring fees to do so.
In fact, MidSouth Bank realized that some customers were using the bank's account overdraft-protection program as if it were a credit card. Those customers routinely relied on the protection to cover checks, racked up corresponding overdraftfees and then found themselves unable to pay offthose fees.
"Many people are living paycheck to paycheck right now. They have no wiggle room at all," says Angelle.
MidSouth Bank already had a program, called Fresh Start, that gives customers who have severely overdrawn their accounts the option to repay in monthly installments rather than lose their account. But the bank decided it needed to do more. So in January 2011, it launched a customer ombudsman program, promoting two people from its collections staffto the new ombudsmen positions, and hiring two others to replace them as collectors, according to Angelle, who oversees the ombudsman program.
The two employees who became ombudsmen, Chad Langley and Amanda Brown, were chosen because they were more than just effective at collections, Angelle says. While collections folks are trained "to have empathy, but not sympathy," Angelle chose Langley and Brown because they also used their sympathetic side....