Because the Wachovia and First Union deal was a merger of equals, the new bank was not under pressure from Wall Street to take draconian measures to slash costs quickly to make the deal pay off. Given the luxury of time, Davis says, the banks were able to plot a "sensible" time line for systems conversion. They divided the project into four regional conversions (Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, then the mid-Atlantic region), carried out over a 15-month window. Wachovia set up a Y2K-like command center for each regional conversion and used a huge spreadsheet to track customer issues as they arose. For each issue, command center staff labeled it major, minor or medium, noted the number of customers affected, and immediately assigned it to a team for resolution. Most were resolved within hours. Processes were fine-tuned with each successive conversion; by the fourth, Davis reports, everything went perfectly.

CEO Thompson sat in on the final preparation meetings preceding three of the four regional conversions. And Davis held off on merger-related layoffs until after the conversion to ensure that the staff who knew the legacy systems best were there to keep them running until every last customer was converted to the combined bank’s systems.

In the end, there were no lines out the door, no headlines about bad customer service. And in a merger, no news is the best possible news.

Customer focus shouldn’t, of course, end once the merger wraps up. At Wachovia, Thompson chairs monthly meetings to review the company’s customer service ratings and calls on senior executives to explain how they’re addressing customer service problems within their groups. And today, even the heads of lines of business are pushing Davis to develop a more holistic view of customers that’s defined by customer preferences rather than by lines of business. Monk is at work on the project now.

"The merger has been completed, and we haven’t lost sight of the importance of the customer," says Monk. And with Wachovia reporting that for every 100 customers lost, 128 are gained, Wachovia is not likely to change its strategy any time soon.