Bank of America 2006 Annual Report Download - page 10

value perception, service quality, operational excellence and
problem resolution, and are tailored to the specific needs of
customers served by each business.
Each of our major lines of business has established a goal
of leading its industry in customer satisfaction within the next
two to three years.
Third, Bank of America has long been a leader in devel-
oping environmentally sustainable business practices, from
energy conservation and recycling programs to the financing
of green building initiatives to our hybrid vehicle purchase
assistance program for associates.
As one of the largest financial service providers in the
country, the opportunity we see in the future is to finance and
encourage the new products, services and technologies that
will help meet future global energy needs. Our goal is to help
our customers and clients take the lead in reducing green-
house gas emissions, and to protect the physical environment
on which economic activity depends. We will launch several
programs in 2007.
Finally, we are working harder than ever to help strength-
en the many communities across the country and around the
world in which we do business.
In the first two years of our 10-year, $750 billion commu-
nity development goal, we have loaned and invested more than
$160 billion in low- and moderate-income communities across
the nation. We are focusing loans and investments in key mar-
kets in need of revitalization, and targeting grant support to
strengthen local nonprofit organizations and to encourage
asset building and financial literacy for consumers living and
working in these markets.
The Bank of America Charitable Foundation, one of the
most generous corporate foundations in the world, donated
more than $200 million in our communities in 2006, and is
on track to exceed our 10-year, $1.5 billion goal for giving.
retail businesses. It includes investments we’ll make in our
businesses, such as those highlighted in the articles that fol-
low this letter. It includes executing our U.S. Trust merger
transition flawlessly.
The second item on this list is the most important thing
we’ll do this year to drive growth: get customer satisfaction
scores moving north again. Regular readers of this letter will
recall that in the first three years after adopting Six Sigma
process improvement tools and methodologies across Bank of
America, the percentage of customers rating themselves highly
satisfied (9 or 10 on a 10-point scale) rose on average across the
company by 11 percentage points, from 41 to 52 percent.
Two years later, those scores have hit a plateau. In
response, associates throughout the company worked with
customers throughout 2006 to better understand key driv-
ers of satisfaction, and to reassess our efforts to drive satis-
faction up. This year, every business has a refreshed plan to
further improve customer satisfaction. The plans focus on
We are working harder than ever
to help strengthen the many communities
across the country and around
the world in which we do business.
8 Bank of America 2006