31. january 2019
A field survey conducted by survey company Dive continues to identify the banks offering the best service. The title of the bank offering the best service in Estonia was overwhelmingly won by LHV Pank, which had previously settled for second place. LHV achieved a result of 94.1%. SEB, the winner of 2017, came second (with 82.9%) and third place was claimed by Coop Pank (with 82.2%).
The service quality survey was conducted using the mystery shopping method. They visited the branches of six retail banks in the larger cities of Estonia. LHV Pank, SEB, Coop Pank, Swedbank, Citadele and Luminor took part in the survey. A total of ten visits were made to every bank, where mystery shoppers addressed a customer representative with the wish to open an account at the bank. A total of 60 instances of mystery shopping were conducted in Estonia and 170 instances in the Baltics.
According to the Head of Client Support, Kristel Paet, excellent service starts with the right people and attitude. “It is in the capacity of a customer service representative to make the life of each client more convenient and to brighten their day. In the previous year, some great new people joined our customer service team, we improved our organisational workflow and asked for more feedback than before from our customers to provide them with an even better service,” said Roostfeldt. “It is actually extremely easy if you put your heart and care into the work you do, are friendly, always think of the solution, act fast and in a precise manner, and remember to smile.”
Compared to the survey conducted in 2017, the average level of service in the banks of Estonia has decreased – while the average figure in 2017 was 83.3%, then in 2018, the average figure of the survey was 81.0%. The banks with the best service in the Baltics are still in Lithuania, where the average result is 89.1%. The winning trio of Lithuania included Šiaulių Bankas (98.6%), Citadele (96.6%) and SEB (92.3%). The pedestal of Latvian banks was occupied by Citadele (92.4%), Luminor (90.0%) and SEB (85.7%).
The survey showed that the customer representatives of Estonia lacked skills for additional sales the most – additional services were offered to mystery shoppers in less than half of all cases. Customer representatives were also in trouble with presenting the advantages of their bank, which was not relayed in more than half of the mystery shopping instances. There is also room for development in concluding a dialogue – in over 20% of the cases, the customer interaction was not completed with a goodbye.
Customer representatives excelled at having a proper appearance and great skills in initiating contact, where the overall results were near maximum. In addition, customer representatives in Estonian banks were polite and customer-driven and could easily find out the needs of the customer. Customer representatives of Latvian and Lithuanian banks surpassed those of Estonia with skills in additional sales and a more positive way of concluding a dialogue, at the same time they had difficulties in presenting the advantages of their bank, similarly to Estonian customer representatives.
Dive Estonia, the leading company focused on customer service surveys, conducts field surveys regularly, offering information based on objective grounds about the levels of customer service in different sectors. The field survey comparing the level of customer service in banks, was conducted from November 2018 to January 2019.
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