This section will focus on the factors within the company that effect its ability to serve its customers and follow its strategy successfully. The factors that will be looked at are: The company, suppliers, intermediaries, customers, competitors and publics.
The Company
HSBC is one of the world 's largest and most successful banks. To have an idea of its magnitude have a look at the organisational structure (appendix 1). In the UK alone it has 1700 branches, approximately 3000 ATM machines, over 42 000 cash machines and over 54 000 employees.
Understandably a company the size of this needs and has a lot of departments. Because of the amount of branches, employees and departments it is hard for them to all work together to provide customer satisfaction. However one of the main priorities for every department is customer satisfaction. Although all the departments don 't work together each department is very large and have there own strategies and are divided into sections that do work together to provide customer satisfaction.
Some of the departments in HSBC are:
· Insurance
· Pensions
· Sharedealing
· Internet Banking
· Automated Telephone Banking
· Travel Money
· Marketing
The department that this is focusing on is the marketing department. The goal of the department is to be:
"The guardian and custodian of customers ' interests within the bank"
(Marketing in HSBC Bank plc report page 7)
This goal shows that the main priority is customer satisfaction. The reason for this is with the growing competition including other banks, building societies, insurance companies and large retailers, customer service and satisfaction are what will get the custom.
The marketing department is the largest department and is divided into 14 separate units to deal with the wide variety of tasks involved in marketing. These units are: · Personal customer marketing
· Business customer marketing
· Customer information management
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Bibliography: HSBC Holdings plc, Annual report & Accounts, 2002, HSBC HSBC, 2005, cash & treasury managers handbook, Europe & middle east, information press oxford Cruickshank. D, 2000, Competition in the UK banking a report to the chancellor of the exchequer, UK, Stationary office Banking, City business series, march 2006, international financial services, London Economics Programme curriculum, volume 2, 2006, Pearson custom publishing National Statistics, 2006, Labour market trends, volume 114, UK, Palgrave Macmillan