"ICBC commitment to services won more customers, as found in a study by a third party professional organization showing the jump of 3.13 points in its service satisfactory score from the beginning of the year to 89.53." an executive with ICBC Tianjin Branch said. Under the banner of "2010 Service Value Year" of Head Office, the Branch launched the performance campaign of Star-Class Service at all the outlets beginning from this year.
In the January to June period complaints from customers dropped significantly. Customers were pleased with the ICBC services. The service quality and business performance of the outlets moved up as well.
Tianjin Branch is not alone. ICBC branches in other areas of the country also achieve good results as the "2010 Service Value Year" unfolded, a programme of ICBC this year with an aim to beef up the bank's services. Within the six-month period of this year, ICBC's service standard has been stepped up under a big agenda of 10 improvement aspects involving outlet service efficiency, electronic banking services, service availability, service details, service standards, etc.
In the end, significant improvements and enhancements are witnessed in outlet services, channel set-up, product innovation, process optimization and others.
In scaling up the service availability, ICBC speeds up a program to refurbish the outlets, redeploy their physical locations, fine-tune their functions and places them under a hierarchical service network. As of the end of June, out of nearly 16000 ICBC outlets, 77% of them are wealth management outlets offering all-inclusive financial services.
Meanwhile, the percentage of customers using electronic banking continues to rise. Electronic banking is now a main channel of ICBC for transactions which account for 54.6% of the total. The continual effort in the innovation of financial product added 441 new products to the offering, to a total of 2807.
The full spectrum of ICBC banking products is a strong backup to meet the diversified needs of the customers.
In raising the service efficiency, ICBC starts the full launch of "Improve 100 service details" with several aims: improvement on the customer services, key steps, critical contact points and service flow. Some outlets are plagued by the long queues during special service hours. To solve the issue, ICBC makes changes on the arrangement of staff and channel.
"Flexible working hours" and "Small shifts" are the new measures to reasonably assign enough staff working in peak hours. Other measures are also taken to increase the service efficiency and shorten the time for the customers to queue at the counter. More staffs are assigned to divert the customers to use ATM or self-service devices and counter staffs are trained up to serve the customers.
In setting up service standard, ICBC sets to improve customer service experience as the fundamental criterion. A set of standard in place includes the staff etiquette, service behavior, environment and flow. Staffs are trained to understand the meaning of services. Their service standard is greatly improved.
ICBC also embarks a campaign among the outlets to nominate gold (star-class) outlets and sets up the exemplary outlets of excellent services in a bid to drive up the service standard of ICBC other outlets. ICBC has the most number of outlets (16 outlets) among the peers named in the 2009 China Banking 100 Model Banking Units of Top Services.
Worthy of note is the notable result of ICBC "2010 Service Value Year" amid the "big test" of financial services for Shanghai World Expo. ICBC Shanghai Branch is a case in point. "2010 Service Value Year" brings a new face to the Branch. Visitors from home and abroad are all deeply impressed by the first-class environment and the well-catered measures of the Branch.
No long queue at the Branch. Call desks at the telephone banking answer over 98% of calls. All ATMs are functional and running at nearly 100%. Emergency services are ready at any time. ICBC Shanghai Branch is also the first in the country to launch "MTR Bank" for customers to bank easily at the MTR station.
MTR Bank is the star of attraction among the financial services available during the World Expo.
As related by the ICBC spokesperson, "2010 Service Value Year" is a continuation of the "Quality Service Year", "Olympic Service Year" and "Service Improvement Year" successively launched since ICBC going public in 2006. In the coming six months, ICBC will continue the effort and strives to spruce up its services to meet the diverse needs of customers for modern financial services. ICBC will dutifully manifest its role as a large bank to serve all.
