CUSTOMER RESPONSIBILITY: INCREASE BRAND’S REPUTATION AND TRUST

The image of the CITIC brand is essential to the Company and always needs to align with the notion of “delivering the best services to customers” that exceeds their expectations. To achieve it, we set higher requirements for ourselves to provide quality and safe products and services for our customers so that CITIC’s reputation will continue to improve and trusting relationships with our customers can be built.

Performance

Awards and Recognitions

• CITIC Bank won the “Excellent Financial Services Bank for Major Clients 2019” at the 14th Asian Finance Conference.
• China Securities was named an “Excellent Investment Education Member” by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and “Best Organization Award” by the Shanghai Stock Exchange for 2019 investor education and protection thematic activities. “Jingxin Academy”, our investor education hub, received an “Excellent” rating from the China Securities Regulatory Commission in recognition of our 2018 operating results. The Beijing Securities Regulatory Bureau therefore gave an additional 0.25 points to the classified evaluation of CITIC Securities.
• CITIC Trust won the “2019 Outstanding Brand Image Award” at the 8th China Finance Summit.
• CITIC Prudential Life won the “2019 Gold Insurance Brand Ark Award” selected by the Securities Times.
• CITIC’s Construction's first phase of the construction of the Royal Albert Dock project in the UK received a “Gold Award of the Royal Accident Prevention Association” and the “BREEAM Certificate of Excellence” in the British Building Research Institute’s Green Building Assessment System. “Belarus Geely Auto Production Line Project won the “China Construction Engineering Luban Award”.
• CITIC Tower (Beijing) won the 2019 World Structure Awards Towering / Slim Structure Award, the CTBUH 2019 Best Tall Building Excellence Award of 400 metres and above and the 2019 RICS Awards - China Annual Construction Project Champion.
• The Principles and Genetics published by CITIC Press were selected as annual management and science books respectively in the “2018 Annual Book Industry Awards ”.
  
  CITIC Environmental Technology “Memstar Membrane” was named the “2018-2019 Most Valuable Environmental Protection Equipment Brand” at the Shanghai Water Industry Hotspot Forum 2019.

Enhancing brand management

We provide high quality products and services to create value for our customer and gain the advantage of being a highly recognisable brand. To maintain and make the CITIC brand more identifiable amongst customers, we launched a brand standardisation and rectification programme in 2019 to strengthen our brand management with a clearer brand guideline. We also announced the authorised online brand users list and conducted the reputation risk assessment to strengthen our trademark protection.

Strengthening the authorisation management of the CITIC main brand

• To align how the main CITIC brand is used, we consolidated the equity registration information of the subsidiaries, and strictly managed the brand usage approval record. Based on stringent management principles and mechanisms, as well as the management hierarchy standards, we developed and put forward a rectification list for current companies and the brand use standards for new joint companies, and established an annual review mechanism for exemptions.

Strengthening protection against reputational risks

• To strengthen the reputation risk prevention mechanism, we revised the Company’s “reputational risk management system” and “media spokesperson system”. We also proposed to develop more detailed management processes to guide our subsidiaries and establish a correct view on reputational risks, emphasising the importance of investigating risks from the source to better manage the reputation risks.
• We focused on reputation risk investigations for key subsidiaries, such as CITIC Bank, CITIC Securities and China Securities, and made recommendations on their reputation risk management by reviewing their compliance situation and internal control risks.

Strengthening guidance to subsidiaries

• Based on actual situations, we set up individual meetings with more than 10 subsidiaries to provide them with recommendations on brand management. We also visited some of the subsidiaries to give them onsite guidance and recommendations.
• We continued to organise brand salons for subsidiaries, bringing together high- quality brand experts to discuss various brand topics, such as overseas brand building and B2B corporate brand building. We also invited representatives of well-known brands such as Huawei, Siemens and IBM, as well as the international judges of the New York Advertising Festival, to share with us. The brand salons were well received by the attendees who participated actively.

Providing excellent products and service

“Customer-centric” is our business philosophy, while customer needs are the guide. To put what we advocate into practice, we continued to provide high-quality products and improve and upgrade our products. We also listen to our customers’ opinions and strive to improve service quality to gain superior performance with superior products and services in customer markets.

Promoting innovative products

• CITIC Prudential Life launched the “Enjoy Good Health” 2019 for adults and children. The insurance plan for adults provides multiple protections for insured persons with complications of diabetes and diabetes management services. The plan for children provides protection for those with congenital diseases and a variety of children-specific diseases. In addition, the Company also launched insurance products that cover expensive medications or potent drugs, such as targeted therapy drugs for cancer. This provides insured persons with multiple health protection solutions, alleviating their financial pressure and difficulty in using expensive drugs. Another insurance plan is called “Medical Treatment Reassurance”, which meets the needs of high-end customers to seeking cancer treatments in the US.

Improving our high standard quality management system

• To achieve our “zero defect” quality goal, CITIC Dicastal employs the PDCA cycle for its quality management system through internal system audits, internal process audits, and staged audits, while evaluating the problems reflected by the customer evaluation, product audits and management audits. Before the products dispatched from the warehouse, multiple production procedures are required to go through to ensure product quality, such as observations, measurements, tests, etc. These results will be used to compare against the specific customer standards to determine whether the product meet all the quality standards. In 2019, no products were recalled due to safety and health reasons.

Providing more convivence to customer service

• To provide self-service like that at the physical counter, CITIC Securities’ provides off-site business processing functions though the CITIC e-investment app, such as linking online security accounts, changing the three-party depository bank, resetting mobile phone numbers, and retrieving account numbers for funds. This one stop service allows customers can open and cancel the accounts on iPad as well. For premium customers, we provide onsite support service. We also set up customer service centres in Qingdao, Hangzhou, and Xi’an. With the CITIC Securities’ information resources and R&D advantages, we continue to optimise voice and online interactive platforms to provide investors with online business processing, securities trading business consulting, returned customers and other comprehensive standardised business operation services.
• CITIC Prudential Life launched and expanded the “Quick Claims” service. With the help of information technology and Internet technology, it seamlessly connects hospitals and company systems by opening an interactive, honest and reliable channel between medical data and the company’s claims system, which reduces their efforts in filling the forms. As of the end of 2019, a total of 110 hospitals in 14 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions across the country had launched the “Quick Claims” service.

Focusing on after-sale management

• CITIC Heavy Industries takes the complaints seriously and has established a comprehensive complaint management mechanism. When a complaint is received, the service department first preprocesses and judges its validity before passing it to the responsible department for rectification. Then the quality assurance department verifies the processing results and oversees the assessment. To complete the PDCA cycle, the service department feeds back the customer. In 2019, we successfully achieved the quality target with a customer satisfaction rate of over 92%, which is higher than our target set at the beginning of the year.

• The quality assurance department at CITIC Dicastal closely monitors the client system to ensure that it quickly responds to complaints once relevant information is received by making an initial response within 24 hours. Based on the after-sales quality problem handling process, an internal analysis meeting is held to find the cause and make improvement recommendations to ensure that all measures can be fully implemented to avoid a recurrence. In 2019, all types of complaints were responded to within the prescribed time, and the customer response rate reached 100% without escalating incidents.

• CITIC Pacific Special Steel conducts customer satisfaction surveys on a regular basis and invites third-party survey agencies to conduct independent surveys on various product quality features, such as packaging and interior and appearance. It also surveys the service before, during and after sales, as well as product delivery and price. The survey response rate is no less than 80%, while the sample size is no less than 10% of our users. We set up a customer database to record basic information, order records, delivery status, purchase volume, quality objection status, satisfaction survey, special requirements, demand changes and other information of each customer. The statistical analysis will help us understand our customer dynamics and will be passed to relevant departments for continuous improvement. The CITIC Pacific Special Steel customer satisfaction survey scored 89.1 points in 2019.

CASE STUDIES
CITIC Construction Signature Projects

In recent years, CITIC Construction has implemented a range of local signature projects that have helped to improve its brand image. These projects have earned widespread public and government praise as well as several awards in the countries where CITIC Construction operates. In 2019, CITIC Construction received many awards and recognitions, including being ranked 54th amongst the 250 top International Contractors “Engineering News Record” (ENR), the U.S. and is ranked 12th amongst the 75 Chinese corporates on this list.

Royal Albert Dock, the U.K.
The first phase of the project was completed and delivered as scheduled. The project has met or exceeded the contract requirements in terms of safety, environmental protection, quality and cost control, which fully achieved the expected goals. The project received the Royal Accident Prevention Association Gold Award, as well as the BREEAM Certificate of Excellence from the British Institute of Building Green Building Assessment System.

Angola Aluminum Profile Factory
On May 21, 2019, the Angola Aluminum profile Factory in which CITIC Construction has invested formally went into production, and the opening ceremony was held in the Luanda Bengo Special Economic Zone in Angola. The plant is one of the large-scale investment projects of Chinese enterprises in Angola, which will help promote the economy and development of Angola, alleviating employment difficulties and improving people’s living standards. A number of local media such as Angola’s National Television Station and the Angola Daily reported on the opening.

Angola RED Social Housing Project
In 2019, when the project was nearly completed, 23,717 units had been delivered, accounting for 91% of the total number of units. The President of Angola attended the delivery ceremony and expressed his appreciation for the construction work of CITIC.

Safeguarding customers’ legal interests

While providing customers with quality products and services, we make every effort to safeguard their legal rights and interests. We provide industry updates and professional knowledge to our customers to increase their awareness of ‘right to know’ as well as enhance their ability to analyse relevant information, which will eventually improve their satisfaction.

Protecting customer funds

• CITIC Bank always puts the safety of customer funds first. The Company constantly improves the customer funds security mechanism and innovates protection methods to ensure security and reassure customers. In terms of customer online service, we put up risk alerts on the login interface of online banking and mobile banking; a risk statement will also pop-up for key transfer transactions at our smart counters; an additional risk alert page will be shown when customers use face recognition. A mobile message will be sent to a specific customer group when a certain amount of money is transferred to a third-party personal account, or an external transfer of over RMB50,000 is made. For transactions of consecutive purchases, cancellations and third-party account transfers, we will send additional verification messages. In addition, when a representative opens a personal account on someone's behalf, we will verify the identity of the representative by phone. When a non-legal representative opens a settlement account, we will verify the identity with the legal representative.
• In terms of technical security, we continued to improve the information security system and added or revised eight information security system specifications. At the same time, we promote the use of ciphers to corporate bank customers and adopted more advanced and effective methods to ensure the security of customer funds. All self-service banks have installed a video surveillance system and are connected to a higher-level monitoring centre to implement for 24-hour remote monitoring. If suspicious persons are found placing illegal card readers or commit violent crimes, the monitoring centre will immediately notify nearby security guards and have them go to the scene immediately, and report to the police via 110.

Safeguarding customers’ right to information

• CITIC Heavy Industries independently developed a Φ8.8 × 4.8m semi-self-grinding mill and Φ6.2 × 10.5m overflow ball mill for the Tibet Yulong Copper Mine, with an annual output of 18 million tonnes. In mid-September 2019, after the commissioning and factory delivery ceremony, our customers from Western Mining, China Enfi and other potential customers were invited to attend the ceremony. This increased customers’ confidence in the Company’s manufacturing ability.

Popularising industry knowledge

• China Securities continued to develop investor education based on its national “Jingxin Academy”. A total of 15,476 visitors were received in 2019. A total of 396 new and original investment education products were invented, attracting 974,739 visitors. There was also a total of 262,876 attendees for 2,520 charity investment education activities. We have actively promoted investor education to replace the national education system and signed an investor education co-construction agreement with Beijing Jiaotong University to develop 71 investment education products suitable for students. The Academy hosted 43 universities and colleges in Beijing with a total of 6,572 students joining the visit. At the same time, it trained 40 school teachers in investment education. The Company also communicated and coordinated with the Shaanxi Securities and Futures Industry Association, and signed a strategic co-construction agreement with Jingxin Academy to help with investor education related to “Belt and Road” initiatives.
• CITIC Prudential Life promotes consumer rights through 3.15 Consumer Rights Day, 7.8 Insurance Publicity Day, and Financial Knowledge Month. We made use of WeChat to publish publicity articles, organised consumer legal rights and knowledge quizzes to improve consumers’ awareness of financial products and services and financial safety. We were awarded “the Outstanding Organisational Unit” for Financial Joint Educational Promotion Activities in 2019 by the China Banking Regulatory Commission. Since 2018, CITIC Prudential Life has organised the “Wealth Legend of Youth” financial and business competition, which helps children to establish a correct view of wealth through games. In 2019, CITIC Prudential Life held this competition for the second time. Twenty-two branches across the country held more than 900 rounds of competition, with a total of 15,788 participants.
  
  

The ceremony for commissioning and delivering the Φ8.8 × 4.8m semi-self-grinding mill and Φ6.2 × 10.5m overflow ball mill for the Tibet Yulong Copper Mine.