As a pioneer in the field of online banking in France, ING has always been a game-changer, a bank that doesn’t do its job like other banks. Especially when it comes to customer service.

So, in 2018, while working on the repositioning of the brand, we asked: What is even more unacceptable than having to wait on the phone? The answer was obvious: Having to pay to wait on the phone.

We therefore decided to address a focal point of customer service: wait time costs. The racketeering must stop. Who better than ING, whose hotline is free of charge, to address this issue, by going even further and compensating their customers’ wait time?

Showing the quality of their customer service, the speed their advisors answer the phone, while sending out a strong message: “ING invests in its clients”, as their tagline states, were the objectives of the campaign.

Generally, when customers call their banks, they know they’re in for a long wait. To prove their commitment to providing the best possible customer service, despite being an online bank, we decided to address this specific problem. Wait time is already free of charge all year round at ING, but, as part of the relaunch plan and the repositioning of the brand, we wanted to go a step further.

For the first time in banking history, if their customers had to wait, they would be compensated for their time at the rate of 60 cents a minute.

For months, the IT department worked on developing a new computer system, which could measure, to the second, the time spent waiting and could automatically transfer the amount of this wait to the customer’s account.

Banks rarely innovate. At most, they all align with the very occasional new services that one of them has dared to introduce. It’s not an industry that looks at things from their customers’ point of view. ING is the exception. The quality of service is at the heart of their brand values. And ING wanted to prove their “human to human” position to the French general public.

By tackling a problem as societal as wait times, the idea was to address all French people. Paying to wait on the phone has been the norm in France for years. Over time, we’ve forgotten just how shocking it actually is.

But when a bank refocuses attention on this injustice, it catches the market off guard and shows respect for its customers and the time they have to wait for an answer when they have a problem.

On September 28th 2018, every customer calling the bank was paid 60 cents a minute for their wait.

ING even created a new computer system specially for the occasion, which automatically transferred the amount of the wait into the customer’s account.

At the same time, we launched an online ad campaign to let the general public know about our commitment. The film was shot with hidden cameras showing real people’s reactions (no actors or extras), when they were asked to pay for the time they’d had to wait, somewhere they weren’t used to doing so. It didn’t take long for people to show their outrage. We even had to stop filming sooner than planned.

The video was launched on social media in parallel with a conversational ad on Twitter, encouraging people to post photos of their worst waiting experiences with the hashtag #WepayYourwait.

Even though the operation only lasted a day, the operation generated:

- Nearly 11,5 million impressions on Twitter and Facebook

- 3 million views on Twitter and Facebook

- 1600 mentions on the Twitter activation, with +95% positive mentions in one day

- PR articles, both in the media and business press, and the general media, including TV.

This operation proved popular with the ING staff and consequently significantly contributed to a sense of collective belonging.