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Enterprise products, solutions & services
July 10, 2013 http://www.telepresenceoptions.com/2013/07/new_channels_offer_new_opportu/
China Merchants Bank (CMB) was founded in 1987 as the first stock commercial bank held by an enterprise legal entity. In 2002, CMB partnered with Huawei to set up a national telephone banking system, the 95555 system.
95555 is a customer service number that provides automatic and manual telephone banking services. The 95555 system has won multiple awards, such as the "Top 10 Satisfactory Brand Name for Service Quality Management of National Call Center" and "China's Best Customer Service Center".
In 2004, 95555 became the first commercial call center to win the "China's Best Call Center" award at the China International Contact Center and Customer Relationship Management Conference. In 2005, 95555 was approved by the China Contact Center Standard for Operation Performance and became the first five-star customer service center in China. For eight consecutive years, from 2005 to 2012, 95555 was named "China's Best Call Center".
By leveraging its skills in service quality and efficiency, the 95555 system was named the "2007 World’s Best Call Center" and "2011 World’s Best Call Center" at the Annual Call Center Expo (ACCE) held by the International Customer Management Institute. CMB's 95555 system is a customer service leader in China’s financial industry.
CMB, adhering to its customer-oriented ideals, is collaborating with Huawei to keep improving its banking services and developing leading telephone banking systems.
The Huawei call center platform supports multimedia capabilities, including traditional voice, SMS, and email services, along with rapidly-emerging channels such as video services, social networking sites (SNS), and web services. Using the media capabilities Huawei’s call center provides, CMB is able to meet it’s customers’ general service needs and provide VIP services to select customers.
The most efficient way to transmit information is by video. Audiences can learn and understand 13% of the information they hear and 83% of the information they see. Huawei’s call center provides video services to support the video-based operation of the 95555 system such as:
Multi-screen video play, Multi-party video conferencing, Video recording and playback, Switching between the automatic, interactive voice response (IVR) flow and manual video agent services, Video calling and call transfer, Quality inspection of agent services, Video call and service menu.
Video services of the 95555 system
Huawei’s network call center solution uses the network to connect multiple independent call centers enabling resource sharing and unified management, which applies to large-scale application scenarios. Huawei’s network call center offers CMB the following benefits:
Sharing of Agent resources, unified routing, and optimized resolution Huawei’s solution deploys network intelligent routing center (NIRC) servers to connect multiple call centers.
Computer telephony integration (CTI) platforms at individual call centers periodically report agent status information to a dedicated site. When all the agents of a call center are busy, the NIRC, based on the collected information, automatically routes incoming calls to the most appropriate call center, which balances the workload among call centers.
Huawei’s solution to CMB classifies agents based on skill queues. When a call center is short of resources on a particular skill queue resources, the NIRC distributes incoming calls to those specific skill queues in other call centers, which significantly improves the resource usage, service quality, and customer satisfaction.
Data synchronization, quality inspection, and online service and data monitoring
The network call center enables high-end users, such as quality inspectors and administrators, to monitor and inspect services. These high-end users, based on the synchronized data, can perform overall service monitoring and inspection, which substantially improves management efficiency and reduces operation costs.
Huawei developed the network call center to enable the sharing of call detail records and integrated with the CRM system to automatically associate call history information, which boosts the continuity of agents’ services and increases customer satisfaction .
Diagram of the CMB network call center
In the past ten years, the CMB 95555 system has evolved from a call center system to a comprehensive customer service system that integrates various applications, such as "Easy Banking", "Payment by Phone", "Go-easy", and "Private Bank". The system uses Internet technologies to provide several online value-added services, such as the recommendation of financial products, reservations for air and hotels, and phone shopping.
95555 system service diagram
The Huawei Contact center platform exposes open application programming interfaces (APIs), ActiveX controls, java telephony application programming interfaces (JTAPIs), telephony services application programming interfaces (TSAPIs), switch computer application interfaces (SCAIs), web services interfaces. The platform also provides the self-service service creation environment that supports standard CCXML and VXML. The openness of the platform ensures the stable development of CMB's personalized services. An official from the operation and maintenance department of CMB’s call center said that the platform offers abundant APIs and data interfaces for customization, which can well support CMB's future development.
The 95555 call center now covers 42 large and medium cities in China with 4,200 trunks, 2,000 agents, and approximately 1,600 employees. This large-scale operation reduces investment costs and enables centralized and unified management for customers, agents, and systems. In addition, the distributed deployment and centralized management reduce communication costs, fulfill the requirements of bank standards and personalized services, and win the approval of the call center and banking industries.
The operation of the contact center depends on available channels. Customers require efficient and one-stop services that offer high quality user experience. Channels play a major role in the ability of contact centers to provide superior services.
Over decades of development, the operation mode of call centers is now transferring from voice-based to data-based contact centers, which brings both opportunities and challenges. New media channels have broader coverage and lower operation and maintenance costs. Channel management, however, has certain risks, and customers require that services be more customized. CMB provides various media-channel services to seize the opportunity and overcome barriers.
In less than three years, microblogs, featuring short text, live updates, wide coverage, and personal interaction, have replaced the traditional one-way flow of information with a two-way flow, which accelerates the development of mobile connection technologies. Enterprises are transferring their microblogs from carriers' platforms to their own official websites, which connect directly to service systems.
The use of video applications in mobile communication started with the development of 3G technologies. Contact centers use video technologies to enable face-to-face services. Though currently limited by bandwidth, video services may undergo further development in the mobile industry as the use of 4G technologies rise and bandwidth costs decrease.
CMB has partnered with Huawei to continuously improve new technologies and applications, such as video, VTM, and social media services, to enhance the 95555 system, which enables CMB to provide better service for its customers.
