Clients & Media Appreciate Citi Handlowy

Warsaw – At the end of September, Newsweek Polska named Citi Handlowy the “silent winner of the ranking” for the best retail bank in Poland. A series of “mystery shopping” tests, carried out by TNS OBOP for Newsweek Polska, showed that Citi Handlowy recorded the longest leap in 2006 – from 14th to seventh position. In October, Forbes included Citi Handlowy in Top 20 Banks for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises. Forbes’ editors examined various banking offers for small and medium-sized businesses and granted Citi Handlowy two stars (out of a maximum of five stars), while pointing out that “the Bank has considerably improved its position as compared with the prior year’s ranking.”

The results of the research and analyses that were published by those magazines are confirmed by data collected by Citi Handlowy and clients’ opinions about our bank. “The ‘One Bank’ strategy works. Now, we are closer to our clients, since corporate branches also serve individual customers, we have deployed customer service outlets in premises of our corporate clients, we sell credit cards at gas stations, and we have new credit cards issued together with our corporate partners (BP, Polkomtel and LOT). All these elements make our clients more satisfied,” says Mr. Slawomir S. Sikora, CEO of Citi Handlowy.

The mystery shopping survey carried out by TNS OBOP covered 420 branches countrywide. Representatives of the research company assessed the quality of service, contacts with clients and account keeping procedures. A standard “client” had a stable relationship, a child, and a white-collar job (average income about PLN 1,500). “I was greeted by an employee when I was still at the doorway,” one of the mystery shoppers pointed out our top quality service. The list of strengths of Bank Handlowy also includes short queues and convenient locations of outlets.

“In the last 12 months, we launched many attractive products, for example a savings account, new co-branded cards or an Internet account. We took care to reduce a client’s service times wherever possible and to offer competitive prices for our products and services. All these factors contributed to such a great improvement of our position in Newsweek’s ranking, but also have built a base for an even more optimistic forecasts of our outcome in the next year’s survey, and our ranking positions,” believes Mrs. Sonia Wedrychowicz-Horbatowska, vice president of the bank and head of the Consumer Bank, the retail banking business of Citi Handlowy.

The “Client First” initiative has boosted the evolution of the bank’s standards – for instance, now when a client needs to open an account wit Citi Handlowy, the time to open an account is shorter by 25% because of simplified procedures and reduced documentation requirements. The bank has taken a number of initiatives aimed at listening to the clients’ needs. For example, there are survey machines in branches allowing clients to express their opinions, on the basis of which customer service is regularly improved.