Bank of America 2001 Annual Report Download - page 21

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19
We offer clients significant advantages: convenient access, a comprehensive product
mix and highly motivated people. Add those competitive strengths to our solid existing
base, and we see significant opportunity for 2002 in the Small Business segment.
There is also opportunity for significant growth among
those small businesses we already count as clients, by
broadening and deepening our relationships with them.
Providing world-class value packages and service, on top of
all the advantages we can already offer the small business
client, will enable us to grow our share of their business.
Finally, we see the opportunity – and the necessity – to
improve client satisfaction. Our focus will be earning satisfac-
tion scores of 9 and 10 on a 10-point scale, which defines the
category of “highly satisfied.” Highly satisfied clients are more
loyal and more willing to give us more of their
business in those deeper, broader relationships.
Customer satisfaction scores will be key bench-
marks for gauging our success as a company.
Executing our Small Business strategy
for 2002, we will address each of these opportu-
nities for growth in the segment, with initiatives
that directly address our determination to attract,
retain and deepen client relationships.
To identify and attract valuable new clients,
we’re expanding our product lines and developing
value packages, as well as more robust information tools and
processes. As with the Consumer Banking segment, we are
placing special emphasis on marketing to multicultural clients
which are so important in our key growth states. Helping them
grow will help us grow, and will make an important contribution
toward the overall Bank of America commitment to diversity.
Enhancing our customer knowledge systems will also
enable us to better understand the needs and opportunities
of our existing clients, so we can better provide the products
and services that are right for them – like online banking, card
services, treasury management and insurance. At the same
time, we will be integrating our sales processes and imple-
menting a disciplined relationship-management model to
provide a more consistent, high level of service to our clients.
To further enhance our clients’ experience, we are imple-
menting new small-business training programs for banking center
associates, so they can provide better, more comprehensive
service. And we are motivating our associates by directly
connecting their rewards, incentives and recognition to their
contributions in helping us achieve our key strategic objec-
tives: attracting new customers, retaining existing
customers, and building stronger, deeper relationships with
all our customers. We’re confident that these steps will be
important parts of our effort to raise client satisfaction
toward world-class levels.
As a further, vital step, we are undertaking intensive efforts
to improve our core processes, which we define as those
processes that directly touch our customers.
Deposit servicing, payment processing and bank-
ing center processes are all areas that our clients
have told us affect their satisfaction. Our intention
is to bring these processes to world class, using
engineering methods that have proven effective in
other businesses. Improving our processes will also
add to shareholder value by enhancing productivity
and thereby reducing expenses.
We are also taking steps to improve our
online banking services for small businesses,
which are already among the best and most innovative in the
industry. We have more than 200,000 active users of online
services among our small-business clients, and we have seen
significant effects. Our online clients are more profitable.
They have higher loan and deposit balances. They are much
more likely to add products and services, and much less likely
to leave the bank. They make fewer calls to call centers for
assistance, making them less costly to serve. When we look
at small-business clients who pay their bills online, those
effects are heightened (see graph, this page). As our clients
access a growing array of Web-enabled financial products
and services, our costs to serve them will decline, and cus-
tomer satisfaction will grow.
In sum, we are confident that integrating sales processes
and focusing on customer satisfaction, associate satisfaction
and SVA will help us build deeper, more profitable relation-
ships – across the bank and in the Small Business segment.
THE ONLINE ADVANTAGE
■
Online
■
Online with BillPay
Percentage Gain from
Online vs. Non-Online Customers
0604020 80
*
Measured in account attrition reduction
Loan
balances
Deposit
balances
Customer
loyalty*