Blind passengers on board
Analysis of the behavior standards in branches of one of the three largest private banks in the form of test purchases
The customers
The employer is a member of one of the international banking groups that illustrates one of the three largest private banks in the economic zone of Germany. With more than 26,000 employees, 680 branches and more than 4 million customers. Private and corporate banking belong to the core competences.
The project
Measuring the “experienced customer orientation” for the identification of measures for the increasing of sales efficiency analyses of behavior standards in branches in the form of test purchases.
The task
The service quality experienced with direct bank contact forms the customer's impression about the total company and is also crucial for customer retention and purchase decisions. The employees act as the central messenger of a brand and a company. The actual service quality experienced and reflected to the (new) customers was raised systematically and validly with the implementation of test purchases.
2hm & Associates controlled the total project and laid special value on the “water-tight” conception:
- Identification of relevant standards in the fields like appointment agreement, reception situation in the main hall, sales conversation, adoption through the consultant or also in the follow up telephone conversation.
- planning of a valid sampling distribution through sales regions and branch departments and beyond
- development of customer scenarios and the data entry form with clear evaluation directions for the test purchases
- determination of an objective evaluation standard that is statistically significant and can be converted into a comprehensible grading key
The realization
In an analysis of the actual situation, the standards are analyzed, structured and the target standards are conveyed in the relevant fields. As a partial project in line with a large change management process, a constant adjustment occurs with the total project leaders and the management.
In a period of only two months, altogether 2000 test purchases were conducted in more than 400 branches of the client and branches from relevant competition.
Qualified, specially trained, external testers, thus potential customers, use services in real conversation situations and evaluate these according to fixed and objective criteria.
With the help of blind test purchases, success factors like service quality, consultant and sales quality and soft criteria like friendliness and attention are inspected objectively in the customer's branches.
The result
The results from blind test purchases are separated for more than 300 branches, about 20 sales areas, 6 sales regions and for the entire bank, this means, individually processed with policy recommendations and competition results. Thus, a conclusive recognition for the optimization of service quality can be achieved on a regional level and strengths in comparison to the competition could be displayed. This is how potential improvement became transparent and usable - and this being systematically from the appointment arrangement to the branch visit to the follow up telephone call. With the help of insight obtained, company-specific potentials were localized concretely and measures were efficiently controlled for improvement.