Branch banking is crushing my soul
I recently started a role as a Financial Advisor earlier this year and my experience has been miserable so far. I work for a low-volume branch that has greatly reduced traffic because of so much construction surrounding the area. This branch has the hybrid banker/teller role as well which I hate because you have high sales targets but deal with all the customers in line every single day. Every day you’d have to find a sale opportunity in the line but it’s so hard to make a sale if the first thing the customer always tells you is “this is unacceptable, I couldn’t even find your branch because of the construction”.
I started out as a teller and while you deal with the fury of customers every single day you do learn a lot. I had sales targets but they were fine. I was in a good branch as well. This sales targets in this branch make no sense to me. You have the same targets as a high-volume flagship branch with 20x less volume. As much as managers in the region like me, I’m one of the bottom performers in the region.
It doesn’t help too I have a very weird manager. Every single day I get called out for absolutely no reason and always says she expected so much more from me. She’s a manager that expects you to get your sales by just calling loads of clients every single day, which I clearly do way more than expected. And then when the client is just in the branch to open an account, she expects you to get the client to open up a credit card, investments, etc. She always wants me to take accountability for things such as stupid tech problems. She even threatened to fire me at one point because I sent a request to a client’s main branch to credit a client with a cash bonus for opening an account with them. Not only that, she micromanages excessively and lashes out at you when she gets overwhelmed. She wants to be looped in every single email you send, and any request you create for individuals working in other branches.
I really need advice on if branch banking is really for me. I don’t mind dealing with customers at all but I hate the sales aspect of it because I don’t agree with pushing so many products when the customer clearly doesn’t want them. I graduated with an accounting degree and ended up as a teller to get my foot in the door for banking experience after not landing an accounting job after graduation.