Customer satisfaction

Our customers are one of our most valuable assets, so we strive to build and maintain close, long-lasting relationships with them and to meet their present and future needs. 

We listen to our customers and work hard to analyze and monitor customer satisfaction trends while gaining competitive insights.

Across all of our operations and divisions, we continue to develop initiatives that focus on our clients, their expectations and their daily experiences, and to integrate their feedback.

This includes the following:

• providing free, seven-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day support via telephone, the internet or mail through our call centers and websites
• integrating customer feedback into the development of products and services by means of regular reporting mechanisms and quality committees
• providing analysis of customer complaints to compliance officers, risk managers and/or communications officers via regular reports and established quality committees
• empowering local personnel to resolve customer complaints

We make use of a common methodology TRI*M Index to monitor the satisfaction of our customers across divisions (for further information, please see http://www.tns-us.com/files/trim.pdf).

Retail and Private Customers

All our countries, regularly measure customer satisfaction. In 2009, the Retail Division in Italy, Germany and Austria, conducted almost 430,000 interviews across the affluent, small-business and mass-market retail segments.
Also, as part of the effort to further align our approach and to create comprehensive internal benchmarks, we are launching a quarterly online survey to measure Private Banking’s TRI*M index across our operations.

To increase customer satisfaction, we have undertaken a range of initiatives, including the following:

• I Am a Customer is one of our core training program that simulates the customer experience in a concrete way by asking participating colleagues to act as customers. This process expands our ability to understand client needs
• Mystery Shopping is a program that continued to play a key role across all of our group countries in monitoring and evaluating the quality of our services by making use of anonymous mystery shoppers to pose as bank customers
• A Day in a Branch involves extended branch visits made by senior managers and headquarters staff with the aim to better understand first contact point issues by promoting the adoption of our customers’ point of view across the group

Corporate customers – Listen to Act

Since 2008, we have been implementing a new customer satisfaction program, called Listen to Act, across our three core corporate banking networks (Italy,Germany and Austria) and several product lines, including Global Transaction Banking and Corporate Treasury Sales. The initiative seeks to better engage our corporate customers, and has enabled us to measure overall satisfaction with corporate and investment banks on a country-by-country basis, as well as to identify benchmarks and best practices.

To analyze key products in depth, such as derivatives, we interviewed more than 2,100 users in our core markets with a particular focus on interest rate and currency swaps in order to assess overall satisfaction with these types of products and the sales process. We then correlated our results with our internal People Survey analyses to identify the key links between employee engagement and customer satisfaction.

For more information and statistical data, please see the “Our Customers” chapter in the 2009 Sustainability Report.