Comparison to Jyske Bank

People, Service, and Profit at Jyske Bank

This case study is about a bank which was in the same position as the Aktia Bank now and I think we can learn from them a lot how to create own and innovative services. The Jyske Bank is a Danish bank which had the same objective like Aktia bank already a few years ago, "to be the bank in their country with the best service to offer", like an executive said they want to be “the most customer-oriented bank in Denmark”. To reach this ambitious goal they used different tools and strategic changes in their company which will presented here. And the main thought behind it was and is to make the company remarkable and differentiated.

Tangible Differences:

Account Teams: In the beginning the Jyske Bank tried to connect every customer with an responsible employee, but quite often this led to unrest because he was not available, so the system was changed to teams which are responsible

Branch Design: The branch design was not too much, just small changes like coffee for every customer, warm colors, the same comfortable chairs for everybody to give a feeling of equality and toys for children to give a feeling of home.

Details: Even the pictures on the employees card where changed to the style of an old family picture because the thought was that “details change everything”

Intangible Differences:

Empowering the branches: They gave for example the responsibility for the approval to the employees as long it was no big loan. This system shortened the time to approval a much, so the customer satisfaction was increased a lot.

Empowerment throughout the bank: The main sentence the management gave to the employees was “does it make sense to ask for help or permission?”. With giving every single employee more power the management tried to get more commitment and interest of them into the bank and therefor interest in the profitability of the company.

Human Resources:

Jyske bank kind of “outsourced” their human research to professionals which were located in the field but for whose advice the branch managers had to pay if they used it. They also changed their selection and are not strictly focusing anymore on banking skills but also on social abilities in their choice. Furthermore every employee got an annual bonus when the bank performed better than the other top 10 Danish banks. They also had the chance to buy 13200 DKK of company stock with a 20% discount. With these programs the management tried to get even greater commitment to the company.

The Jyske Bank Value Chain:

 

Johannes 

Some links which could be of use in Kunstenniemi:

This is about the Global Service Jam 2013, which was conducted in over 100 countries in many different locations; one of them was Boost Turku

http://planet.globalservicejam.org/home

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY49OE9PScU

Interesting services and projects evolved out of this 48h and now in Inno we have even 58h so we should be able to achieve even more, but there are some funny videos as well which maybe will trigger our creativity ;)

And here is a link to the book we used there, unfortunately I couldn’t get it to take it with me to Kunstenniemi but the website shows a good summary of it, also with some short videos.

http://thisisservicedesignthinking.com/#

And here is a short presentation which gives easy insights in service design:

http://issuu.com/paulthurston/docs/uxbrighton_edit.ppt

Finally a website which could provide us with some tools which should be used to design a good service:

http://www.servicedesigntools.org/

Johannes

Learning portfolio - Rasmus Kuhlberg

Here are some thoughts about what I've learned so far from this course and all the blog posts that I've contributed with for this course so far:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M4IqvXc313eK5cbwcf61HzcRRm8wQrweJLKUbnzsC5I/edit?usp=sharing

Some questions mailed to Aktia's management.

Togeather with Mikael Lundqvist from the other Aktia- group we contacted Marc Hinnenberg to get some answers on some questions that we've been pondering over. Unfortunately Marc is on paternity leave so we contacted another member of Aktia's management. Hopefully we'll get some constructive answers before 15.4. 

""Hej! 
Vi är två grupper från innovationskursen INNO58h (Åbo Akademi, Turun Yliopisto, Folkhögskolan Novia och Turun AMK) som har fått i uppgift
att göra ett arbete till Aktia som främst tangerar er framtida utveckling samt strategier. Om ni möjligen kunde svara på följande frågor skulle
det vara till ovärderlig hjälp för vårt arbete.

- Vi har hört att Akitas mål är att år 2015 vara Finlands bästa bank på service; hurdana åtgärder och hurdan strategi har ni för att genomföra målet?

- Har Aktia planerat att göra eller håller Aktia på att göra en "bank-app" till smarttelefoner? Hur kommer den att verkställas och vilka tjänster kommer
den att innehålla?

- Vilken är er viktigaste målgrupp/kundsegment inom private-banking?

- Vad upplever Aktia själv att är dess starka sidor och vilka kunde utvecklas?

- Hurdan skolning har Aktia för arbetstagarna och hur ofta håller Aktia skolningar?

- Finns det någon möjlighet för oss att få tag på "test-bankkoder" för att se hur ert Internet-kontor fungerar?

Stort tack på förhand!

Med vänlig hälsning, Mikael Lundqvist och Rasmus Kuhlberg (ÅA-studerande)"


// Rasmus

Advertisement...

Hi again!

I did some research on how Aktia advertises its services, and the thing is they actually only advertise on the internet and in some brochures which one dose not see much of. They do advertise a lot in smaller communities with big sings and sponsorship's, but if you don't really know anything about them from before you wont get much out of their logo, so that is why I think they need a little face lift.
On the other hand there advertisement of services on the internet are really good in my opinion, since the webpage is really easy to use and has a simple layout even though there design is nice and pleasing to look at.
http://www.aktia.fi/sv/

As someone mentioned earlier in this blog many people think that Aktia is a totally Swedish bank, and yes there are a lot of "Swedish speaking Finns" that use this bank but this is a point which needs to be removed if Aktia wants to grow, and I would love to help given the chance next week. I also have a lot of service advertisement's on my mind right now just waiting to put them on paper at Kunstenniemi.

1. Fast and Easy to change language
2. Easy and stylish to browse through, find what you are looking for fast
3. Check their interest rates fast while browsing
4. Use their fast and easy shortcuts
5. Give them a call with any given problem, you will find their number fast and easy

More to come so stay tuned...

Cheers

Fred

Visit of Aktia/Turku

Last Friday Max and I visited together with two members of Team Royal Mess the local Aktia Branch in Turku to get some deeper insights and help with our task.

First the regional branch Manager, Christian Holmqvist, gave us a tour through the different departments, starting with the Real Estate department, to the Investment and Company part and ending in the private customer area. During the tour he described us how they are working in the different departments.

Afterwards he invited us to ask him any questions which he answered as good as possible, to summarize it:

One strength of the Aktia bank is that they are small, what enables them to have a much closer customer relation which is also based on a long time partnership, due to this the bank has a better knowledge about their customers than the main competitors. One thing which shows this is that Aktia is not using a call center, but the customers always call the local branches. Furthermore it is common practice to call the customers annually to be informed about their needs and there are also customer events for the same reason. Another tool used to have this close connection is that every customer is assigned to a team of employees.

The main competitors are Nordea, Dansk. One of the weaknesses, compared to these competitors, is the size, because innovations are quite often too expensive for such a small company and they do not have as many offices as the other banks, an example would be an app for banking which is already offered by many competitors but not Aktia. Still the bank tries to have the “best service in Finland” in 2015. The strengths, regarding the departments, are located in the very good asset management but the real estate department is performing quite poorly. 

About the strong connection to Swedish customers: many people think that Aktia is a Swedish bank which is not true and it even tries to get rid of this wrong stereotype. Still in the Turku branch 60 % of the employees are bilingual and approximately 50 % of the customers are Swedish speaking.

In my opinion the visit was very good and important, I by myself feel now much more connected with the project because I can see how “real” it is and that there is interest in the bank for innovations.

Johannes

5 Principles of Service design thinking

According to Stickdorn et al. (2011) there are five core principles of service design thinking:

1) User centered, which means that everything should be experienced from the customer's point of view.This means that we need a certain amount of customer participation to be able to understan what our customers actually want and keep the service running. We should slip into the customer's shoes and try to understand the individual service experience and the wider context in it. This is something that Holthuis (2011) also pointed out in his presentation, i.e. the importance of customer insight.

2) Co-creative; We should include stakeholders in the service design process. We should include e.g. the front line staff, back-office emloyees and managers , as well as non-human interfaces such as vending machines and webpages. During the design process co creation includes a smooth interaction between the stakeholders during the service provision that is necessary for a sustainable customer and employee satisfaction. Through co-creation, customers get a chance to add value to the service in cooperation with the service provider.
             
"The more the customer is involved in this service provision, the more likely this service is of evoking co-ownership which in turn will result in increased customer loyalty and long-term engagement." (Stickdorn et al. 2011)                                                                      
                                           
3)Sequencing; We should visualise the service as a sequence of interrelated actions.  We have to consider the service timeline when we design a service, because rhythm really affects the mood of the customer. Trying to imagine the service as a movie might be helpful. We should prototype services and test their impact on customers.

4)Evidencing; We should visualise intangible services in terms of physical artefacts. This means that we need to make customers aware of of the intangible service. This service evidencing (e.g. a souvenir to remind you fo a holiday memory) can help us reveal inconspicuous backstage services. This service evidence needs to be carefully designed according to the service's underlying story and its touchpoint order.

5) Holistic; We should consider the whole environment of the service. We need to remember that even though a service is intangible, it takes place in a physical environment through physical artefacts and often generates some kind of physical outcome. Customers feel, hear, smell, tuoch and taste the physical manifestation of the service. It is important that we mad the mood and feeling of all stakeholders throughout this service journey.

Considering the service provider, the focus should be on the service provider's organization; the system design of the organization, the inherent culture, values and norms and its organizational structure and processes play an important role in the issues for the design of the service. This means that the gap between the corporate identity embodied by the company's management/staff and the  image perceived by the customers needs to be wiped out.

 All in all, we should remember that service design is more about focusing on humans than organisations and finding a way to co-create value.

References:

Holthuis J. (2011) Service Design, TedXHamburg. Available on:
http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxHamburg-Joost-Holthuis-Serv

Stickdorn M., Schneider J. & Co-authors (2011) This is Service Design Thinking - Basics - Tools - Cases, Bis Publishers.

/Bella