Branch and sales service representative Katie Browne helps a customer at TD Banknorth’s new branch in Boston’s Copley Square, which features personal interaction with customers via “dialog banking.”

TD Banknorth’s third location in downtown Boston doesn’t look like a typical branch.

There are no lines at lunchtime, no glass windows and no tellers counting money out of a drawer at the small Boylston Street office opposite Trinity Church in Copley Square.

Computer screens, secure cash machines and bank employees who “welcome customers at the entrance, work with them side-by-side on transactions, and educate them on products and services” have replaced them.

“Customers are really in shock,” said Mauricio Burgos, customer sales and service manager at the branch, who formerly held the same post at the bank’s Federal Street office. “They say this is more like the future. But their reaction [in the end] is, ‘Oh, I like this. I can see what they’re doing.'”

TD Banknorth, the Portland, Maine-based bank owned by Toronto-based Toronto-Dominion Bank, is pioneering the new banking style, called “dialog banking,” in the Boston market, where it wants to grow, according to spokeswoman Jennifer Carlson.

“We’re not the first bank in the [United States] to do this, but we are the first in Boston,” she said.

Transaction times in the dialog banking environment are faster, Burgos said. “Customers like not being blocked by glass.” And security is better, since all money deposited goes into a steel cash machine attached to each computer station that requires 15 minutes and codes held by two different people to open.

The cash machines, made by Chicago-based De La Rue Cash Systems, are particularly convenient for business customers in the Copley Square retail hub, Burgos said. Their deposits are quickly counted and credited by the machine, replacing slower counting by human hands. If the customer thinks the machine makes a mistake, it will release the same bills just deposited so they can be recounted.

De La Rue’s Web site boasts that automating cash transactions with its machines “can release over 2,000 teller hours a year, freeing up branch staff to concentrate on higher-value activities such as new accounts, cross-selling and up-selling.”

The Copley Square branch is also the first in the TD Banknorth chain to feature the concept. The bank hopes customers will be attracted to the more face-to-face level of service.

But Boston-area banking and marketing consultants said it’s too soon to tell how it will work.

“Wait six months,” said Jim Jones, president and founder of First Wellesley Consulting, a bank strategy consulting firm based in Wellesley.

The actual environment at a teller-less bank branch certainly appears to be more open and relaxed, he noted, but there’s a different kind of pressure.

“Customers won’t be talking to a teller, but a well-trained salesperson who will be looking for the opportunity to cross-sell,” Jones said. “Tellers are not sellers. They are not, by temperament or training, the best salespeople. When you create dialog banking, you need to recruit and train salespeople to play the concierge role.”

Banks that use the concept hope it will help them sell more products and services by creating an environment in which a customer “may be more open to a sales pitch,” he suggested.

Jones said the question becomes whether a customer walking into a bank sees it as a retail environment. He added, “The only negative would be if they feel that they’re pressured to buy.”

‘A Very Strong Relationship’

Still, Jones said, Seattle-based Washington Mutual Bank introduced the dialog-banking concept in its West Coast branches about a decade ago. So-called “Occasio”-style branches feature “retail banking stores” with circular layouts; teller “towers,” in place of teller windows; and children’s play areas.

The concept apparently works well for WaMu, Jones said, because the bank continues to deploy it. “Occasio” has reached WaMu branches all the way to New York and Connecticut. (In Massachusetts, the national financial services giant has mortgage lending centers but no actual bank branches). Banks and credit unions in the Midwest are also starting to introduce it, he said.

Suzanne Moot, owner of M&M Assoc., a Milton-based marketing consulting firm, said she is not convinced the banking-style “experiment” will be a success.

For a brand-new facility, and especially for a bank that doesn’t have a lot of branches in Boston, she said, it’s a risky move.

In the 1980s, Moot noted, Shawmut Bank reconfigured its branches so that tellers were either hidden or non-existent, and placed ATM machines in the main lobby.

“They thought that people would happily use the ATM and not the teller,” she explained. “It failed miserably.”

Moot, who worked in Shawmut’s Marketing Department at the time, said she recalls visiting one of its western Massachusetts branches with the reconfigured design and noticing that the branch manager had taped a sign to the door that read, “Please come in – we are a full-service branch.”

TD Banknorth’s dialog-banking branch will have employees in the lobby greeting and helping customers, but Moot remains skeptical.

“If it doesn’t look and feel like a teller,” she said, it just isn’t. “I have even done statistical analysis and looked at dollar deposits compared to the number of tellers, and there’s a very strong relationship.”

Moot, like Jones, said only time will tell how well the branch succeeds.

Each June, banks report their total deposits by branch to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said Moot. “Next year, it will be interesting to see what [this branch] has been able to generate.”

Watching FDIC reports isn’t a foolproof method of assessing a particular branch’s success, however. Moot said banks sometimes choose to credit one type of deposit, such as all business deposits, to another branch or a local headquarters.

TD Banknorth will measure the success of its new branch based on “its performance, its location and how well it meets customers’ needs,” Carlson said.

At the Copley Square branch last Monday, two customer transactions took about five to seven minutes each, with the help of a 20-something bank representative, who had to use the phone in the lobby to solve a problem of a non-functioning ATM card.

It worked – and transaction times will get faster, predicted Burgos predicted, who said “it’s easier than you’d imagine” to use the computer stations and cash machines.