Deeply committed to customer experience and satisfaction, United Bank for Africa (UBA) has within the Covid-19 pandemic, deployed a total of 100,000 Point of Sales (PoS) terminals to merchants, Ariaria market Aba, restaurants, Street and other markets, for seamless access to banking transactions by customers.
To further include the unbanked and the underbanked population, the bank has established 5,000 banking agents across the country.
“We did over N50 billion on PoS and agency banking and we are sustaining these ecosystems, post-Covid-19,” Alex Alozie, group head, operations, said at a virtual media parley to celebrate Customer Service 2020 on Wednesday.
Michelle Nwoga, who also spoke at the meeting, said the bank prides itself as an organisation that always takes customers first.
She said COVID-19 has changed the way businesses do business and that the bank is now very much a data driven organization.
“You have to transform internally to be able to deliver value for your customers. We have kicked off a transformation journey that will be able to impact our customers,” Nwoga said.
The theme of this year’s Customer Service Week is ‘Dream Team’. The Customer Service Week is an annual celebration globally in recognition of the importance of customer service, to appreciate the staff who serve and support customers with care and professionalism.
Alozie said in the last one year, UBA embarked on an intensive drive to transform its services to customers, not only in the banking halls in Nigeria, but also across Africa and beyond, to all the regions where it operates.
He said the bank has made sure that its customers enjoy optimal self-service, where they can make use of their devices to carry out any form of transaction seamlessly, without having to go to the banking halls.
“We have seen a lot of improvement in this area, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, I can say the pandemic brought out the best of us. With newly improved products like UBA Connect – where our customers can carry out transactions from anywhere in the world – and our recently improved mobile applications, our uptime has improved significantly, and our branches have also recorded considerable improvements. All these are a result of the transformation journey embarked upon by the bank,” Alozie said.
In its expansion plans, the bank intends to open additional 25 branches across the country before the end of 2020. Alozie said this in responding to BusinessDay’s question about strong focus on digitisation leading to closing of some branches. He said branch closure is not in the agenda of the bank.
According to him, the bank is moving in a direction that would ensure that every customer’s needs are met whether by the brick and mortar bank or through digital offerings.
“We have opened 6 branches in the last two months and we are committed to opening 25 branches by the end of 2020.”
As part of the bank’s Customer Service Week celebration and to appreciate customers, 12 customers won N5,000 each while 10 customers won free airtime during the UBAInstaLive giveaway. The next giveaway will hold right on Twitter on Friday at 6:00PM, the bank tweeted.
