DenizBank Financial Service Group - Relationship Management Solution – New

Company: DenizBank Financial Service Group
Company Description: As a universal bank with leading presence in all business lines, DenizBank serves customers in corporate, commercial, SME, and consumer segments offering fully integrated financial services with 14.500 employees. Owned by the biggest bank of Emirates NBD as of August 2019, again one of the leading institutions in its region.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Relationship Management Solution – New

Nomination Title: We maximized our efficiency with KOBI’Deniz while keeping our customers happy

Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, explaining the features, functions, benefits, and results to date of the nominated new or new-version product or service, OR a written essay of up to 650 words describing the same? (Choose one): An essay/case study of up to 650 words

This nomination is about KOBİ’Deniz; our new remote relationship management channel for MICRO segment SME customers.

With this new service model, small SMEs no longer need to visit our branches, and can complete almost all of their banking needs with a single phone call. Unlike a call center, this new service works as a private service center with all capabilities a branch has.

The rationale behind this innovation is obviously gaining a competitive advantage with

Customer service quality always comes first: this ensures profitability for us, while supporting continuous customer growth.

Challenges:

Traditional service model to SMEs failed as our customer size grew:

1- We place relationship managers in branches:

- Small relationship managers for MICRO and SMALL segment customers,
Small relationship managers are slightly more junior, and need to deal with two different customer segments: MICRO and SMALL.

- Medium relationship managers for MEDIUM segment customers.
Medium relationship managers are more experienced and rarely spend time in their branches

2- The relationship manager, and the branch, are expensive resources. Paying rent in some of the most expensive locations in each city, along with salaries to relationship managers. Expensive resources have to spend their time more efficiently

Conversely, our MICRO customers are just as much in need of banking services and finances and inconveniences such as waiting in a line or having to deal with tertiary channels are definitely not preferable quirks of working with a bank.

3- MICRO segment customers are responsible for the majority of the service costs, they visit our branches the most and do the majority of the transactions by number.

4- Due to having to deal with MICRO segment customers, SMALL relationship managers cannot care for the larger SMALL segment SMEs, which results in a loss for our bank.

Solution:

Looking at what could be an efficient way of serving to all our customers, we believe a method similar to the restaurant industry might be just right.

Our MICRO customers need a small number of products served through a low-cost channel,

Our SMALL customers need care and relationship management, each product can be cheaper than offered to MICRO, but we should intend to earn the customer’s respect to make sure the customer does more of their banking business with us.

Our MEDIUM customers need full service: they offer a large business volume to us in return, and can work with other banks at a whim, therefore value service quality above everything else.

Our branch service model therefore bottlenecks, preventing us from serving most MICRO and SMALL customers properly.

We therefore needed to remove most of our MICRO segment customers from our branches, but needed to do so without leaving them alone.

We set up a single floor in our HQ for KOBI’Deniz channel. Each RM was assigned 6 branches and all the “low value” MICRO SMEs from these branches were directly assigned to a single RM. Every time they called their branch or our call center, they are directed towards the same relationship manager that can take care of any banking service.

Started with 15 Relationship managers in January 2019, and have increased up to 60 by July 2019. MICRO segment customers from 500+ branches are now being served by these relationship managers.

Results so far:

-Branch profitability of KOBI’Deniz integrated branches increased by 20% in first 9 months.
-Average waiting time in KOBI’Deniz integrated branches decreased by 98% (35 min to 1 min) Customers are being called If they get q-matic tickets in branches from KOBI’Deniz.
-Average monthly transaction number per SME RPM increased by 68% Customers who are introduced to KOBI’Deniz has contacted their RM more and more as they do more transactions.

-Average monthly visits made by branch RMs to medium customer increased by 140% Faster and easy access to RMs resulted in more satisfied customers.