How Videoconferencing Helped BNZ Grow Small Business Sales

New Zealand may be best known as the backdrop for the Lord of the Rings movies and for its large population of sheep — it has 40 million sheep, 10 sheep per person. But New Zealand and Australia are also where some of the most ground-breaking financial technology is pioneered, from cloud computing to mobile payments to videoconferencing.

Bank of New Zealand has moved all of its small business bankers to a centralized hub from which they communicate with clients through videoconferencing hookups in the branches. Customer satisfaction, profitability, and the number of small business customers have all grown substantially.

Next year, BNZ will begin providing video banking online. This will let the small business owner connect through videoconferencing with a specialist business banker from his laptop, iPad, Surface tablet or other video-enabled device anytime from 7:00 a.m. to 10 p.m.

"In 2009 we took a look at how we service small business customers," Harry Ferreira, head of small business banking at BNZ, recalled this week in an interview at the Small Business Banking Conference in Boca Raton, Fla. "Customer satisfaction was low, productivity was low." The bank's small business market share was 15%. When surveyed, small business customers said they wanted better accessibility, simple pricing, easy-to-understand products and better advice.

Since deploying videoconferencing and incubator-like spaces for small business clients in all its branches, BNZ has seen a 22% increase in customer satisfaction. Its market share has grown to just under 24% and it moved from being the fifth (and last) in small business banking to second bank among New Zealand's five banks.

"We doubled the number of small business customers we have — it was 48,000, now it's just under 90,000," Ferreira says.

He estimates that staff productivity among small business bankers has improved eleven-fold. Return on investment for the bank's small business line is 22%.

People often ask Ferreira if something gets lost in the transition from dealing with customers face-to-face to videoconferencing. At first yes, but in the longer term, not at all, he says.

"The branch still connects people together," he explains. "We did lose some face-to-face interaction in the beginning until we got better at communicating what we were doing with employees internally and with customers through social media." Ferreira stars in a weekly internal TV show called Edge TV, in which he expresses his vision for small business banking to 5,000 employees. "Trying to get all the branch managers to understand and support what we were doing was a challenge," Ferreira explains. "But in every branch there will be one or two people who don't mind video" and those people help support the initiative. To improve customer communication, the bank set up a BNZ Connect forum where customers post what they think of the bank and staff respond in seconds.