By Doug Miller

Maybe, just maybe, America’s retail bankers really don’t get it. Despite being hauled before Congress, derided by the president and sinking like a bar of gold bullion in an increasingly choppy sea of public opinion, maybe they’re just incapable at this point of seeing the balance sheet for what it really is.

Could be a medical issue, you know? Too many frontal-lobe neurons rewired into a kind of pathological anti-consumer circuit after a decade of profligate regulatory freedom and incessant customer abuse. In which case, some caring counsel and gentle guidance may be required. Herewith, then, a five-part prescription designed to return retail bankers to mental, ethical and economic health.

One

Get real. And by that we mean be honest with yourselves about the world and your place in it. Ultimately, it’s the truth that will set you free, not regulatory laissez-faire, and you can begin your rehabilitation by acknowledging this undeniable fact: You don’t make money, you take it.

Why is that important to understand and accept? Because there’s a dire need for some humility here. In the commonly understood hammers-and-nails sense of the word, your industry really doesn’t make anything at all. When the day is done, your bank hasn’t directly manufactured a car or built a house or composed a song or written a story or paved a road or made someone healthy. Technically, you don’t even make money. Only the U.S. Treasury and its international counterparts can do that.

While we’re here, let’s extrapolate just a bit and remember that—as a guard against inflation—the Treasury generally prints money only as a replacement for the millions of ones and fives and tens and twenties that constantly disintegrate in an economy that ceaselessly passes them from hand to hand. In other words, the object is to keep the money pool constant, which essentially means it’s a zero-sum game. No matter how many transactions occur, at the end of the day the sum total of cash out there is basically the same as it was yesterday; it’s just in different pockets.

Your business is the one that helps move it around. That’s really all you do. You don’t actually make anything. You take stuff from one person and give it to another. And you need to remember that.

Two

Stop acting suicidal. Customers are your business lifeline, and doing things to hurt them amounts to nothing less than a death wish. More than 70 percent of America’s Gross Domestic Product (of which your business is an inescapable part) derives from consumer spending. You and the rest of corporate America seem to be forgetting or purposely ignoring that fundamental fact, and as a result are wreaking havoc with the economy and people’s lives.

Look, this is simple. If you continue to bite the hand that feeds you, you’ll starve. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow. But in the long run you will waste away. The dissipation, in fact, already has begun. A new Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey shows that Americans don’t have a lot of trust in financial services companies nowadays, and a J.D. Power & Associates study makes it clear that only 35 percent of customers feel highly committed to their banks—down six percentage points from 2007.

So the message is this: If you plan on staying in business, you need to stop alienating current and potential customers. Which leads us to…

Three

Make customer satisfaction, not shareholder satisfaction, your No. 1 priority. Without a satisfied customer base, you won’t have shareholders. If you’re unable to comprehend that rudimentary concept, you shouldn’t be running a business. Seriously.

Four

Stop being sneaky and start dealing openly and honestly with consumers, on an individual basis. People want you to judge them based on the way they work with your specific bank, for instance, not by the way you think they should be handling their accounts at Home Depot and Macy’s. Of course they’re offended when you raise the annual percentage rate on their credit card just because they’re 15 days late with a payment to a separate service provider who has nothing to do with your bank. Who wouldn’t be? That kind of behavior is sneaky and unfair. People expect it from swindlers and scam artists, not from their bankers.

Going through the backdoor to increase revenue is another no-no. Consumers aren’t stupid. They know when the charge for using an ATM jumps 33 percent, and they know how to compare it to a cumulative inflation rate of 20 percent over the same period.  They aren’t blind, either, to a near 50 percent increase in overdraft charges. In a recent Money magazine article, a J.D. Power expert noted that one in three customers switched banks during the past year to escape being charged unjustifiably high fees.

Try ringing the front doorbell instead. Tell people exactly who you are and what they can expect. Get to know your customers (Isn’t that a Sarbanes-Oxley requirement, after all?) and deal with them as individual human beings, not actuarial figures.

Five

Lastly, deliver an honest-to-goodness service. Checks with pretty landscapes on them are nice, but that’s not really what customers want. They want you to make it genuinely easy for them to save and spend and manage their money. Don’t use technology to squeeze them; use it instead to help them get the most for their dollar. That’s a service for which they’ll pay a reasonable price, as your credit union competitors all across the country are quickly learning.

Money reports that in the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index, credit unions scored nine points higher than banks, a ranking most likely affected by the fact that they routinely offer better average interest rates on checking, savings and money-market accounts and a wider range of useful services. San Francisco Fire Credit Union offers its members free FICO scores four times a year, for instance, and immediate posting to customer accounts of deposits entered online or over the phone. How long does your bank make customers wait before they can use their own cash?

A more pertinent question, though, is this: How long can retail banks wait before they decide to treat customers as a valuable asset and not a necessary evil? The answer is: not very.

Hey. You’re bankers, for crying out loud. How hard can it be to count to five?

Doug Miller is a former director of internal communications for Citigroup and has written extensively about the use of technology in financial services.