Case study

KBC

KBC is a group of 41 000 talented employees in different countries who work together and share a common culture. They put their clients’ interests at the heart of what they do and strive to offer them at all times a high quality service and relevant solutions. KBC aspires at being far more than a bank and an insurance: “we want to enable and protect the dreams of our clients.” While striving to offer their clients an unique bank insurance experience, in 2018 CEO Johan Thijs announced their ambition to become the most personal and ‘digital first’ bank in Belgium.

The challenge

KBC has been working with a consultative sales model for years. Despite the customer focus in which the employees are trained, they noticed that not every customer has the need for a warm introduction and extensive needs analysis.

KBC realizes that the consultative sales structure they have been using for years has a relational slant. As a result, outgoing and informative customers are not being served to measure. Because it is their strategic ambition to become the most personal and ‘digital first’ bank in Belgium, they have opted to adapt their historically established sales process to suit every buyer’s needs (R, I and O methods). RIO personality based selling is being rolled out for all commercial touchpoints, physical and digital.

Approach

  • Workshop for the stakeholders and executives per segment in which commercial processes are analyzed, the skills to be developed are determined and objectives and KPIs are established.
  • Interactive and hands-on RIO introduction training with a pilot group of relationship managers and experts wealth accumulation.
  • Elaboration of a customized blended (online & offline) transformation process, the associated tools and plug-and-play solutions, including a co-creation of 21 e-learnings.
  • After a successful pilot project we started implementing the RIO methodology for various teams and departments such as business managers, commercial employees, regional office workers, segment of wealth, Insurance customer advisors, community managers, etc.
  • Field coaching to bridge the gap between theory, practice and results.
  • During the collaboration, there is frequent consultation with the stakeholders and managers in order to be able to adjust quickly and to ensure continuity.
  • Creating broad support for the RIO methodology within the organization to align all commercial people with the renewed strategy, so that it can be felt by customers and thus leads to improved results. We do this through frequent consultation with the stakeholders and managers, RIO training for segment directors and Senior leadership teams, “coach the coach”, ‘Train the Coach’ and ‘Train The Trainer’ across the different departments and segments including retail banking, KBC Insurance, private banking and KBC Live.
  • We provide an annual accreditation per trained trainer in the context of quality control, whereby we follow and validate a scheduled RIO training.

The outcome

Leuven-based KBC has taken over from AXA as this year’s (2020) most popular bank, according to a survey carried out by the personal finance website Spaargids.be, in which 55,000 people took part.

KBC has been announced to be the bank with the most satisfied customers in 2020.

best bank of the year

Last year, KBC achieved a score of 6.9 / 10. Now the bank has already received 8.0 / 10.

Best mobile & online platform

Overall, KBC receives a score of 8.5 out of 10.

Most innovative bank

For the investor approach, a score was assigned for personalized investment advice, physical or digital. For the broad ‘most innovative bank’ segment, KBC achieved an overall score of 8.0 / 10.

We are a consultancy company that helps organizations drive revenue through hyper personalising sales conversations and customer touchpoints.