• 'Connect with your expert' is a free service where the customer is assigned a personal account manager and the relationship is conducted remotely
  • The business volume managed using this system is also expected to almost double, from 11,000 to 20,000 million euros
  • The bank's target for 2019 is to have one million customers signed up to this service
  • 38.4% of customers have a multichannel relationship with the bank, compared to 31.5% in December 2015. Of this total, 43.3% are considered digital, as they carry out more than 90% of their transactions online
  • Through 'Connect with your expert', customers can do everything they can in a traditional branch, without having to actually go to the branch, as all the products are available remotely

Over the course of this year Bankia will double the number of customers served by remote personal account managers through the 'Connect with your expert' service, from 300,000 to 600,000.

'Connect with your expert' is a free service where the customer is assigned a personal account manager and the relationship is conducted remotely: by telephone, email, chat, etc., through whatever device the customer chooses (desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone).

The business volume managed using this system is also expected to practically double, from 11,000 million euros last December to 20,000 million by the end of this year.

The bank's goal is to reach one million 'Connect with your expert' customers in 2019. 'These estimates are based on the behaviour our customers have shown in recent years. Our goal is to scale the service up as the demand from our customers grows,' says Nemesio Fernández, director of Multichannel Business at Bankia.

At the end of last year, 37.6% of the bank's customers conducted their relationship with the bank through more than one channel, compared to 31.5% one year earlier. Already by March this year the figure had risen to 38.4%. Of this total, 43.3% were considered purely digital customers, as they performed more than 90% of their transactions online.

A notable feature of this development is the increasing use of mobile phones to carry out financial transactions. At present, 38.2% of all Bankia's transactions are carried out by customers using mobile phones, compared to 25.7% in December 2015.

The same transactions as in traditional branches

Using 'Connect with your expert' a customer can carry out the same transactions as in a traditional branch, without having to make a trip to the branch, as all the products are available remotely.

'We have made an effort to listen to our customers and they have told us that their level of satisfaction increases if they are allocated to a particular person in the bank, an account manager who is proactive and offers them financial solutions to their needs. Every customer wants to be attended to and advised differently and our challenge is to understand each person's needs and deliver a personalised proposal,' Nemesio Fernández explains.

'Connect with your expert' is thus fully personalised: each customer is assigned an account manager, who is always the same. The account manager is the customer's go-to person in the bank.

This service is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Between 8:30 and 18:00 the customer is served by his or her account manager. At other times, the customer will be attended to by a member of the account manager's team.

In conversations with the account manager, the customer can establish at what times of day and by what means he or she wishes to be contacted and on what subjects, so as to define the information he or she wishes to receive.

Customers are served by managers who come almost exclusively from the branch network (around 95%) and who have exchanged face-to-face customer service in the branch for a personal service delivered remotely. All the managers receive training, mainly in remote customer service. To date, these professionals have received more than 26,300 hours of training.

Multichannel centres

The managers are organised along the traditional lines of a branch network, with teams of around ten people for each virtual branch. These virtual branches are grouped in multichannel centres, which currently are physically located in Alicante, Barcelona, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Logroño, Madrid, Tenerife and Valencia.

The distribution of multichannel centres is intedend to strike a balance between service efficiency and employability, as the centres employ people who come from the local branch network.

These centres comprise a total of 43 multichannel branches and 470 account managers. By the end of the year the number of branches is expected to have grown to 50 and the number of account managers, to 500. For 2019 the goal is for the number of 'Connect with your expert' advisers to be close to one thousand.

The process of signing customers up to 'Connect with your expert' at Bankia is distinctive: the service is offered to customers who have a multichannel profile and it is the customer who decides whether he or she wants to use the service or not. Any customer who accepts is assigned a remote personal account manager in the bank. Take-up of the service is above 90%.

The fact that a customer has a remote account manager does not mean he or she cannot also use the branch network. ''Connect with your expert' users are still assigned to a branch and can use the physical branches whenever they see fit,' says Nemesio Fernández.

'In other words, Bankia's strategy is not to make its customers digital. They choose. We merely offer them all the access options and it's the customer who chooses which option to use at any given time,' Fernández adds. 'So, for Bankia, customers are multichannel, not just digital.'

By mobile phone and in the afternoon

Around 66% of customers prefer that the bank contact them by mobile phone, 10% have opted for email and the rest have no preference as to how they are contacted. As regards time of day, 61% prefer that the communication take place in the afternoon. The products most in demand among users of the service are consumer loans, mortgages, insurance, credit cards and direct deposit of income.

User satisfaction with this service, measured as the percent of users who give the service a score of more than seven out of ten is 93%, compared to 89.2% for the bank as a whole, which is already the highest level recorded in Bankia's history, according to the banking sector reports issued by the Stiga consultancy.

The net promoter score, meanwhile, which is the difference between the number of customers who give a score above nine and those who give a score below six, is 64 points, compared to 35.7 for the bank as a whole, which again is the highest level ever recorded in the bank's history.

New Bankia app

Bankia recently launched its new app, which has also contributed to an improvement in perceptions of service quality among 'Connect with your expert' users. The app includes a bank-customer relationship module. This is a space from which the customer can get in touch with his or her personal account manager in a simple, agile and transparent way.

By selecting the appropriate option in the app, the user can call the account manager, ask the account manager to call back at a stated time or start a chat, with the possibility of attaching files and sending voice notes. The app also has a search function and a history of documents shared with the account manager.

Nearly one million customers currently use the bank's app at least once a month.

Bankia SA published this content on 08 May 2017 and is solely responsible for the information contained herein.
Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 08 May 2017 21:12:07 UTC.

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