If you don’t live on the East coast, be aware. Commerce
Banks have been popping up left and right. From Connecticut to
Washington, in Virginia and Florida, the bank keeps putting more
little red dots on the map. One of the key players behind the
scenes is Linda Verba, Executive Vice President of Retail Operations.
For the past eight and a half years, Verba has led the chain’s
tremendous growth from 75 to more than 400 stores. She has
brought new product and service innovations, as well as stellar
customer service to the very traditional banking industry.
Commerce’s
slogan is “America’s Most Convenient Bank,” and
Verba is all about making it more so. “Customer service
has always been part of the fiber of my being and that is the
greatest value that I bring to this company.”
Some of the bank’s user-friendly features are that they
are open 7 days, make funds deposited by 6:00 p.m. available the
next day and reimburse customers for using foreign ATMs. On the
lighter side, they also have free “Penny Arcade” coin
counting machines, lollipops and dog biscuits in the lobby (and
the drive-thru), and give away tons of free pens and coffee mugs. |
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Verba oversees the front lines of the company’s stores,
directs retail support operations and their call center. “I’m
not a banker,” she said. “And this really isn’t
about banking, it's about running a service-based company. At
the end of the day, my job is to make customers happy.”
The Retail Track
Verba was raised outside of Pittsburgh and had a “traditional
family upbringing”. Her father was a first generation immigrant
and worked for U.S. Steel for 43 years. Her mother stayed home
to raise Verba and her sister. They taught her to work hard, always
take the high road and sent her to parochial schools. She recalls, “there
was nothing like the nuns in those days”.
Growing up, Verba never had a plan. She rolled with the punches
and took advantage of opportunities as they presented themselves.
Verba still goes with the flow. Some days she’s up
early to work out or catch a plane. On others, she stays in bed
and pulls the covers over her head.
Her mother would have sent her to secretarial school, but Verba
wanted to go to college. Her father said she could go on one condition
-- she pay for her first semester to prove that she really wanted
it. So, Verba got a job at Kaufman’s department store and
at the same time started her freshman year at Penn State University.
Not only did she make it through that first semester, but she graduated
four years later with a Bachelor of Science in Education. The first
kid in her extended family to go to college, Verba worked at the
store all the while, and did just about every job out there, including
being one of Santa’s elves.
When she couldn’t find a teaching job after graduation,
Verba moved to Boston with friends and started working for Filene’s. “They
ran the best retail model,” she said. It was there and at
her next post at Strawbridge & Clothier, that she learned how
to satisfy a customer.
Taking the plunge
However, it was at PHH Mortgage, where Verba worked for 13 years,
that she grew up professionally and had the biggest turning point
in her career. As head of HR, she was busy encouraging the company
to grow employees and take them to the next level when her boss
asked her to create and build a company call center. She had never
done anything like that and was hesitant. He asked her to put her
money where her mouth was and said, “You're standing on the
dock and you've got one foot in the boat. I don't care what you
choose, but you have to choose.” She got in the boat,
learned how to run a business and has been doing it ever since.
It was also around this time that Verba decided to get married.
She was 37, and although she was having a “great life”,
she decided to take the plunge. When she and her now husband, Bob
Hofman told her family the news, they thought that she was going
to say that she was pregnant and that they were going to skip the
wedding part. She remembers her grandmother, who was in her nineties
at the time, looking up at the sky and thanking God that she was
finally getting married. Years earlier, her grandmother gave Verba
her wedding band, figuring that she was never going to get one
on her own.
Verba called her husband, who is a carpenter and has his own business
importing sporting equipment, a “pretty cool guy.” He
is secure and fine with the fact that she is a Verba and he’s
a Hofman.
Verba said, “I’m very strong-willed, purposeful. I
can execute like nobody else. And I’m sure my colleagues
wondered who on god’s green earth would marry this lunatic.” But
when she started bringing him to business functions, they all walked
away saying what a great guy he was and she can’t be so bad
if he married her.
Although Verba worked until 11:00 the day she got married and
until 3:00 the day she gave birth, the first description that comes
to mind isn’t workaholic -- though she may be one – it’s
high-energy. “Look,” she said, “this isn’t
for everyone, and I don’t mean this to be the basis of comparison
for all women.”
Verba herself was recently named one of NJBIZ magazine’s
Best 50 Women in Business, and in 2005, she was awarded a “Shatter
the Glass Ceiling Award” from the National Association of
Women Business Owners.
The meaning of Success
Verba said the key to her success is that she is beyond resilient. “If
I fail, I fail. I’m not going to itemize them for you, but
believe me I’ve had some beauties. But at the end of the
day, it’s what you learn from them.”
She also talks to customers regularly. If they call her,
she takes the call. She doesn’t pass it along or bump it
down. She regularly reads customer comment cards and reacts to
every single one of them. “People might say well, gee, that
sucks up a lot of your time. Do you know what? It really doesn’t.
It’s the fiber of who we are. And its great to catch the
kids doing it right.” She said that it takes a nanosecond
to “shoot somebody an e-mail who was mentioned by a customer
and say great job. Thanks for what you do everyday.”
Verba is most proud of the how the bank makes service delivery
look easy. “This operation has tens of thousands of
moving parts, hundreds of thousand of customers and very few dropped
balls.”
Looking at things from the customer’s perspective isn’t
only something that Verba does at work. She looks for service everywhere.
Recently, she took her daughter, Mackenzie (now 17), shopping for
a prom dress. After five stores and countless dresses they finally
found “the” dress. “My daughter’s face
absolutely positively lit up. So I said to the woman, let’s
just get the tailor over here to get the dress altered. The woman
looked at me and said, ‘we don’t have anyone who does
alterations.’ I said “Excuse me, I’m paying $500
dollars for a dress and you don’t have anyone who does alterations?” My
daughter’s reaction was ‘mom’s gonna blow. I’m
not gonna get to buy this dress.’ My kid so wanted the dress
so I said fine, but I’ll never shop there again.”
Verba says she leads a charmed life. “I have a cool husband,
a terrific kid, a wonderful boss and a great career with lots of
good people who support me, personally and professionally.” But,
she says, “I absolutely positively believe that’s because
I have one hell of a good attitude.”
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