OREANDA-NEWS. February 20, 2014. Sviaz-Bank (Vnesheconombank Group) and the International Analytics Unlimited Bank Club have held a conference devoted to management of services provided to bank customers.

The conference was opened by Olga Oleinik, Vice Chair of Sviaz-Bank’s Management Board, who stressed the importance of the subject under discussion: “There is nothing like triviality in efforts to improve the quality of customer services, from interaction between the bank and its customers, to customer satisfaction and loyalty, to assessment of the quality of services provided. One of the objectives of this conference is to give an overall picture of current trends in customer service management, combine the experience of conference speakers and audience, and develop expert viewpoints.”

Mikhail Doronkin, deputy head of the Lending Institutions Rating Service, Expert Rating Agency, gave an overview of the market situation – on January 1, 2013, the portfolio of loans to individuals had grown by 39%, on the same date of 2014, the growth had slowed down to 29%, and is predicted to decline further to 22% by January 1, 2015. “The slowdown can be attributed to market maturity and market regulation,” said Mikhail Doronkin.

In this situation, a greater role is given to customer service. Nadezhda Bogdanova, managing partner of the TMI Business Systems Company, said that customers nowadays value quality more than they do price (97% to 92%). Vasilisa Zulfikarova, director of the customer impressions service, Promsviazbank, shared her experience in building a quality management system from ground up in her bank. Guzelia Imaeva, General Director of the National Agency for Financial Studies (NAFS), announced the results of the sociological poll held under the motto “An Ideal Bank in the Customer’s Eyes,” which named government support for banks among factors of significance to customers. According to Ms Imaeva, 55% of bank customers give a high assessment of the services they receive from their banks. In her turn, Yana Leikina, a business consultant, spoke about the technique a bank can use to assess its own service standards – “customer confidentiality” comes first: “It is a perfect tool for planning, assessment, and problem analysis,” Yana Leikina believes.

Katerina Filippskaya, an expert with an experience in establishing technical and information support call centers for Microsoft Corporation and the TRUST Bank, provided details of efforts to set up an efficient call center: “A fresh operator acquires a professional status 30 days on average after starting up business. Talks by fresh callers have best to be monitored once a week, and those by experienced callers, once a month.”

The conference was attended by over 70 bankers, some of them coming from Russia’s outlying regions.