Supporting our customers is at the heart of everything we do. In this year of great challenges and change, our customers are receiving the benefits of our focus on improving their digital experiences and listening to their needs. There has been a good response to our efforts - we maintained strong customer advocacy scores throughout the year while closing the gap to the market leaders.
Improving services
We improved a number of key services throughout the year to help our customers by launching
- the new Great Southern Bank website which makes it easier for customers to find relevant information and engage with our service teams.
- a dedicated Seniors Hotline featuring specially trained team members to help older customers with their banking needs.
- our Lendfast system, which has us to reduce the average time to agree a home loan by a full day. Through the system, our customers can now also make their home loan application entirely online, with a dedicated online service agent available to help when necessary.
Among a number of other improvements online customers can now set up a digital card via Apple Pay directly after opening a transaction account, or when they’ve reported a card lost or stolen, allowing them to make purchases straight away. Our customers can also self-serve more easily thanks to new mobile and online banking features which enable them to more easily report lost and stolen cards, change their PINs and activate new cards.
We also launched The Vault to help our customers achieve their goals, such as saving for a home deposit, by ‘hiding’ their savings away from the main account page. This is part of a suite of clever functionality such as our savings ‘Boost’ that further supports our purpose of helping all Australians own their own home.
Healthy changes
We announced a new strategic partnership with not for profit health insurer HBF, which enables us to offer HBF’s broad range of health insurance products to our customers. The sale of CUA Health also allows us to focus on our core banking business, and help customers with all aspects of their home ownership journeys, whether it’s saving for a first home, buying a portfolio of houses, or being financially secure enough to help the kids buy their first property.
Standing with our customers
Throughout the pandemic we have been steadfast in our support for our communities and customers. While 99 per cent of the almost 5,400 members we helped during the peak of the crisis have now rolled off financial assistance, volumes are still 30% higher than pre-pandemic levels.
Branch refurbishments
We are engaged in an ongoing refurbishment project for our entire branch network, with our Melbourne CBD branch the first to open in the new designs. The new, more open plan designs are more inviting for customers, and feature new technologies encouraging communication and collaboration among team members. We are committed to our branch network, and are currently looking to open new branches in locations where we believe we can help more Australians to own their own home.
Listening to our customers
Last year we engaged with over 25,000 customers as part of our Voice of the Customer reviews, taking their feedback and making it part of ongoing customer service improvements. Their input has been essential to all our key decisions this year, from our rebrand through to our online customer journeys and our focus on helping all Australians own their own home.
The true test of our success is of course customer response, and our Net Promoter Score – an industry standard for capturing customer advocacy - remains far ahead of the big banks, and has improved further since the start of the year.