Postbanken - Dialogue with employees who have customer contact

How to get through the distribution channel

Postbanken sells its products via the post office in Sweden. The post office as a distribution channel was chosen as the strategic cornerstone. To ensure employee motivation to work for Postbanken, all employees with customer contact were involved before the bank’s strategy was defined. Employees were asked for their advice: What do you like about your bank that we can learn from? What do you think is the biggest influent when people choose their banks? Would you recommend Postbanken to your friends and acquaintances?

66% responded to the letter. Using these answers, administrative director Hans Benndorf responded to all employees with individualized comments to their views and, most importantly, why the bank was perceived the way it was – based on input from the employees. Hans Benndorf continued this individualized dialogue with the employees – a dialogue that evolved into a closer communication in which a positive feeling that Postbanken was the post office’s own bank was created.

Follow-up activities:

Double or nothing
Transfer your savings and your loan to Postbanken and participate in a contest to double your savings and dissolve your loan.

The right track?
Letter and survey regarding what should be changed and what wasn’t working right after the bank’s startup.
Result: 35% actively participated in the dialogue about what we could do better.

100,000 customers
From the survey in the welcome package sent to customers, we knew that many had chosen Postbanken because of contact to “real” people at the post office. We took advantage of this opportunity to congratulate the employees and give them the honor when the bank rounded the 100,000-customer mark after only 6 months.

Challenge
Make twice as many sales in the upcoming period and win.
Result: 87% of all post office branches doubled their sales of deposit products for 4 weeks in a row.

“Soccer tournament”
All post offices were divided up according to sales volume. Then everyone in the same group played each other in turns in a sales tournament using the known soccer tournament concept. Example: Wednesday – Stockholm Nord against Göteborg 3. The ones who sold the most Postbanken products won. The tournament was arranged with 2 game days per week, with training and warm-up the day before the game. Follow-up results were posted daily via intranet to ensure high attention to game results and positions.
Result: Advance in sales throughout the game period of 20%. The activity was repeated on the employees’ own request.

Become a customer and get 3 liters of ice cream
Summer is traditionally low season for financial products. Post offices are also affected by vacations and stand-in employees during this time. To ensure less of a decline in weekly sales, the bank executed an activity in which the only thing the employees had to do was say: If you become a Postbanken customer you’ll get 3 liters of ice cream.
This activity resulted in a 40% improvement in sales during the summer period.

FEDMA Best of Europe, Special Award 1998

Direct Marketing Prisen 1998, Special Award

Echo USA, 1998 & 1999, Leader Award