team spirit - Bankier.pl

Linking sales
channels
� Mix of sales channels: After several years of parallel developments
in branch-based and mobile sales, telephone/mobile
phone, online and Internet banking with partly exaggerated
expectations – culminating in the New Economy euphoria
around the millennium – both consumers and banks today use
all channels simultaneously and in a complementary manner.
Under our integrated multi-channel management approach,
we link the various sales channels and use them for acquiring
customers, conducting information and sales campaigns, and
for handling day-to-day business.
Services at branches remain key to customer relationships; we
have reorganised our branches in line with our new customer
service approach. The activities of mobile sales teams are a
flexible and dynamic way of meeting customer needs (independent
of location and outside normal opening hours of
branches), they complement services provided through
branches and generate additional business. When BA-CA
Finanzservice GmbH was established in 1999, new business
generated by the unit was less than € 500 m; in 2005, more
than 2,000 external sales partners and 120 mobile advisers of
BA-CA Finanzservice GmbH generated new business totalling
€ 2.5 bn, including about one-half of BA-CA’s new business in
the area of housing and construction finance. We are enhancing
the quality and intensity of mobile sales through ongoing
monitoring of sales partners and by extending these activities
to include new customer groups and providing support to our
sales partners in the areas of securities investments and pension
planning so that they can offer an all-inclusive range of
financial services.
Our Customer Contact Center (CCC) has developed into an
important channel supporting customer services provided at
branches. The Vienna-based CCC employs about 210 staff of
HVB Direkt’s 1,300 employees. Outbound service agents contact
between 20,000 and 30,000 customers during each sales
drive organised by our campaign management specialists. In
2005, they arranged 50,000 appointments with account managers
in the wake of mailing initiatives. They also made more
than 1.1 million telephone calls to perform important service
functions: 24h ServiceLine and Helpdesk, e-mail and e-shop as
well as the OnlineB@nking and Electronic Banking help desks.
Over 600,000 TelefonB@nking transactions and securities
orders were processed in 2005. Customer contact is increasingly
taking the form of a dialogue also via electronic channels,
especially the Internet. In 2005, our OnlineB@nking service
was accessed 28 million times, a figure which confirms the
central role of this medium for customer contact.
� Product policy and development: The redefinition of
customer segments in line with the bank’s new customer service
approach and the focus on specific requirements go hand
in hand with a needs-oriented product policy. Especially in
54 Austrian Customer Business
standard customer business, the bank has identified customer
needs that arise at different stages in people’s lives and can be
met with standardised products better and at lower cost than
through a number of individual transactions. This helps to
reduce the complex variety of instruments available, in the
interest of both the customer and the bank. In this context,
standardisation is not in contradiction to customised service.
For example, in the lending business, we linked our FlexiblerKredit
loan product with Sicher-
Standardised
heitsPakete insurance components which can
product packages
meeting individual be tailored to individual needs. On the invest-
needs
ments side, we responded to current expectations
of investors and their respective
risk/return preferences by offering a range of mutual fund
products. The market success of guarantee products in 2005
impressively confirmed this strategy. We benefit from an integrated
product policy and from the fact that product development
and marketing are closely coordinated with sales units
through various feedback loops.
In the “TopKunden” groups of private customers and SMEs,
the focus is still on individual advisory services using the entire
range of financial market products, securities transactions and
specialised third-party products. We provide these customers
with our asset management services and the range of products
and services offered by our private banking subsidiaries
BANKPRIVAT and Schoellerbank.
Production in a narrower sense is performed by the bank’s specialist
departments and subsidiaries such as AMG, which is also
responsible for discretionary custodian business and provides
information to account managers, and Capital Invest, BA-CA’s
fund management company. Membership of UniCredit Group
will widen the variety of regions and industries covered, especially
through the planned cooperation with Pioneer Group,
while further reducing the use of third-party products.
� Direct marketing and campaign management: The
“industrialised sales process” includes an analysis of customer
needs and the preparation of data for targeted customer contacts
in direct marketing. Statistical methods used for data
mining enable us to identify all potential target customers for
specific applications and standardised products according to
dynamic criteria, i.e. according to concrete needs (probabilities
of actual purchase) instead of statistical features. We see this
also as empowerment of branch-based sales teams: in 2005,
some 350,000 sales hints per month were sent to account
managers via the SalesManager (SAM) database. Campaigns
for the introduction of new products are coordinated according
to a defined time schedule. The interplay of direct marketing
and customer service supported by product incentives and
advertising measures meets with a very favourable response
from our customers.