2010 is the ICBC "Year of the Service Value", a new year that ICBC is going to employ all available tools at its disposal to improve quality of service, according to the ICBC spokesman. ICBC is determined to become a large customer-focused bank serving the economy and society through diversified and modern financial services tailored to customer needs.
ICBC starts from every service detail and continues to work on improving the service efficiency. More service channels will be created, more financial products will be offered, more efforts will be dedicated to streamline the service management.
As related by the same ICBC spokesman, ICBC held a video conference to kick-off "Year of the Service Value 2010" in mid-December, 2009, where thousands of ICBC staffs participated including heads of all levels of ICBC organizations. At the conference, ICBC Chairman Jiang Jianqing stated very clearly that heads of all levels of ICBC organizations and all business departments should formulate the necessary measures based on the opinions and suggestions from grass-root outlets and customers.
After the conference on December 18, 2009, Chairman Jiang Jianqing visited an ICBC outlet in Financial Street and ICBC Telephone Banking Center to suggest "how to offer more convenient, faster, more user-friendly services to customers".
As stated under the "Year of the Service Value", ICBC has established improvement measures in 10 areas to address the salient issues and create value for customers. These 10 improvement areas lie in outlet services, Electronic Banking services, floor services, service supply, service details, service standard, monitoring of customer satisfaction, internal service commitment and staff training.
In enhancing the efficiency of outlet services, further changes will be made in staff arrangement and service model. These include: reengineer the service process, optimize the allocation of resources, add more self-service devices, take statistics, analyze and forecast the customer flow, set up a system to highlight the service peak, open more service windows, and an express channel for petty cash transactions.
In strengthening floor services, more floor managers will be deployed. Their performance will be assessed. Presidents of the Sub-branches are required to be on duty at the counter floor to help serving the customers and coordinating the services. In service details, ICBC will embark a program "Every staff involved improving 100 service details".
Every important step and critical contact point should be considered in detail. Everything starts from serving the customers from the customer perspective. The program aims to attend every detail and brings excellence to the customer experience. In setting up service channel, in 2010, renovation in outlets will be run in parallel with the expansion of electronic banking.
Priority will be given to outlets and financial kiosks with heavy traffic on customer and service, especially the Sub-branches in the counties where renovation will be concentrated in providing a comfortable environment for customers to bank at ICBC. In the provision of financial products, ICBC is committed to remain customer-focused and has been at the forefront of innovation and technology in coming out more new products to the market.
"Year of the Service Value 2010" is a continuation of the "Year of the Quality Service", "Year of the Olympic Service" and "Year of the Service Improvement" successively launched since 2006. For the past few years, while ICBC serves and supports the economy, ICBC services have witnessed great changes in terms of content, option and means by the wide application of innovation and modern technology. Especially being listed after shareholding restructuring, ICBC establishes firm modern service philosophy change. ICBC signals a transformation on its increased service ability.
In serving and supporting the economy, ICBC continues meeting the State's macro control policy and regulatory requirement. ICBC plays an important role as a large bank through enhancing its service quality in supporting the stable and healthy development of the national economy by taking all necessary steps in lending to move the industries up the ladder.
That includes the working relationship between credit policy, fiscal policy and industry policy and the optimization in the allocation of loan capital. To further support and improve the financial services to small-and-medium enterprises (SME), ICBC has established nearly 1000 organizations dedicated to service small enterprises as a strategy in line with the State's policy of supporting the growth of SME.
ICBC is the largest financial service institution serving SME in the country after lending to almost RMB 2.4 trillion. In serving the retail consumers, ICBC continues its innovation in consumer lending products and service means. As of today, ICBC's outstanding balance in personal loans stands at RMB 1.
1 trillion that comfortably supports the spending of all.
In service supply, ICBC changes course by reengineering the service channels. ICBC boosts a dimensional and diversified service network of subsidiaries and outlets as the bottom channel, electronic banking as the main transaction channel and customer managers as the main sales channel. For the past few years, ICBC has been investing heavily in the outlet distribution and renovation in order to offer a nice environment for customers to bank at ICBC.
To serve this purpose, 56% of the outlets have been renovated. ICBC cranks up its marketing and customer services by setting up 3600 new mid-and-high end outlets including private banking, wealth management centers and VIP centers. ICBC Electronic Banking is moving fast with transaction volume well over RMB 170 trillion in 2009 and more than 56000 ATM and self-service terminal in the country.
Nearly 10 million transactions are processed through ATM every day. Today in ICBC, almost 50% banking transactions are not processed at the counter. More important, ICBC spent huge efforts in building up a large customer service team made up of nearly 60000 qualified customer managers in various fields.
Out of them, 11405 are associate financial planners and 1866 are certified financial planners. When compared to domestic peers, ICBC has the highest number of qualified professionals in serving the customers. In offering financial products, ICBC through continuous innovation now boosts a portfolio of over 2400 financial products.
ICBC is the banking institution in the country offering the most number of and most complete financial services not only covering all the commercial banking areas, but extending to other markets such as securities or insurance. At the heart of ICBC's product offering are commercial banking products and services across different markets.
In speeding up service efficiency, the aim is to offer fast and convenient services. ICBC starts from breaking the system or process barrier by repeated streamlining the processes, integrating and optimizing the configuration of business factors and enhancing the service model. In 2007, ICBC started the project of process optimization in personal banking services.
All the business processes and processing steps were reengineered and optimized to simplify the flow of front desk transactions and shorten the transaction time. In 2008, ICBC started the reengineering project on corporate service processes. Before the project, credit rating, assessment and authorization were performed by different departments or branches, and too many steps in approving a loan.
Instead, new processes enable market to react and respond fast. Since this year, ICBC has spent further efforts in operation management reform. The aim is to establish a "Customer First" operation by increasing the support from back office to front desk. To achieve this, resources in back office were integrated and consolidated through the reform in the back office monitoring system, remote authorization and centralized processing of services.
Some outlets are plagued by the long queues during special service hours. To solve the issue, ICBC made changes in staff arrangement and service model based on the data collected during the peak hours at major outlets. Such measures include: more service windows, Presidents of the branches on-duty at the counter floor, floor managers advise the customers to use the electronic channel.
Industry insiders believe that ICBC, the largest bank in China with the highest number of customers, brings real benefits to over 200 million personal customers and nearly 3.5 million corporate clients by all its assiduous efforts in improving service. In this regard, ICBC also helps to push the service quality and efficiency of China's banking industry to another dimension.
