A Look at Woori Bank

Seoul, Korea-based Woori Bank is building a customer service powerhouse, and winning awards -- and customers -- along the way. Here, Kim Jinseok provides unedited notes on Woori's focus and priorities.

Jinseok Kim

We recently interviewed Mr. Jinseok, Kim, senior director of the Customer Satisfaction Center at Woori Bank, at the ACCE conference in San Diego. Woori Bank, which means "our bank," is based in Korea and has won a number of prestigious industry and customer service awards. More importantly, it is winning customers in a competitive and fast changing market. The following is an overview—a "behind the scenes" bullet-point look at the center and what it's focused on, as provided by Mr. Kim:

Characteristics of Operation and Current Focus

• Serves as a hub for all non face-to-face contact with customers

• Integrated management of customer service, voice of the customer, CRM, and branch support

• Branch support: various inquiries, help-desk operation, foreign language service, field support, loan extension, video consulting service, and ATM management

• Launched "Campaign for Excelling Customer Satisfaction," led by the president of the bank

• Concentrating on improving customer accessibility and convenience

• Preemptive (proactive) identification of customer need and support

• Constant customer and competition research – including gathering advanced information, analyzing it, reporting on it

• Regular town meetings for generating ideas among counter and center agents

• Customer contact by one number (5000), free access of 080 call service

• Operate "Woori-Call Academy" and build "Skill-Up System"

• Skill and knowledge level test and promotion test (the highest ratio in evaluation, once every quarter)

• QA system for counseling skill-up, coaching, training.

• Manage employee satisfaction programs; focus on fun work environment, participation of top management, incomparable reward system, superior evaluation

Vision—World's Best Call Center

Future Plans and Priorities

• Expand field support function

• Support field service personnel

• Loan extension

• Identify and support various customers' needs preemptively

• Continue to increase the ratio of non face-to-face contact; > 71% by 2004, > 78% by 2007, > 85% by 2010

• Actively discover unnecessary workload in face-to-face contacts and transform them into non face-to-face contacts

• Expand cross-selling and maximization of synergy across channels and services

• Maximize utilization of inbound calls

• Real time access and update of CRM database

• Expand customer scope (individual and corporate accounts)

• Integrate channels—e.g., card accounts with bank's accounts

(Editor note: thanks to Dr. Ki-Ju Cheong – Director of the Call Center Industry Information Center and President of the Academic Society of Call Center Services—for his part in making this interview possible.)

Jinseok, Kim is Senior Director of the Customer Satisfaction Center at Woori Bank (www.wooribank.com), based in Seoul. He is a graduate of the Department of Commerce & Trade, Hongik University, and has been with Woori Bank since 1975.