Siam Commercial Bank bridges the contact center and the enterprise

Mar 31, 2009 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) -- SMUCF | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Siam Commercial Bank, one of Thailand's leading financial services institutions, has deployed an Alcatel-Lucent-based solution in order to fix a service failure issue, increase customer satisfaction and drive revenues. Companies in emerging markets are often the first to adopt IP-based technologies, and extensive and successful implementations of this kind will encourage others to follow suit.

At its annual massive user gathering in Paris, Alcatel-Lucent rolled out a new customer recognition program called the Alcatel-Lucent Dynamic Enterprise Awards. In its inaugural year, the Dynamic Enterprise Awards recognized four end user organizations for the way in which they showed that 'fully leveraging the interconnection of networks, people, process and knowledge using IP technology provides unique competitive advantages.'

One of the award winners, Siam Commercial Bank, demonstrated an especially intriguing deployment. The deployment shows both how enterprises in emerging markets can and do leapfrog ahead of enterprises in mature markets, and how the flexibility provided by IP contact centers paired with collaboration technologies allows enterprises to provide the optimal mix of customer service and revenue generation.

Siam Commercial Bank is one of the leading retail and commercial banks in Thailand, with the largest branch network in the country, more than 10.5 million deposit customers and more than one million credit card holders. As the bank grew, it accumulated a multi-site and multi-vendor contact center set up. As with many multi-vendor solutions, Siam Commercial Bank's customer service center faced instability due to the need for inelegant integrations among the different components in the multivendor solution. This left the bank facing intermittent system failure, which is an unacceptable state of affairs for a customer-service focused organization, particularly one with a contact center organization that handles more than 1.5 million calls per month.

As part of its plan to consolidate its infrastructure, the bank began an extensive review process based on a shortlist of three leading contact center vendors: Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya and Aspect Software. The bank chose Alcatel-Lucent due to its approach to routing and its ability to integrate with the bank's existing investments. The extensive solution that Alcatel-Lucent created for Siam Commercial Bank included OmniGenesys IP Call Center and the Genesys Workforce Management application to manage the contact center resources.

Infrastructure consolidation projects such as these can have tremendous impact on both customer service levels and cost reductions. Indeed, this was the case for Siam Commercial Bank but Datamonitor does not believe that is the most important aspect of the project. The solution also includes the CC Teamer contact center collaboration tool, as well as a robust voice and data network to provide the infrastructure required to link contact center agents with knowledge workers inside the company. This was the region's first deployment of CC Teamer, which is Alcatel-Lucent's hallmark collaboration system. CC Teamer has presence embedded into the interface, allowing agents to identify appropriate back office workers on the company's local area network, check the availability status of those workers and then connect to them for assistance with a customer contact.

In the solution's initial iteration, Siam Commercial Bank allowed agents who were unable to answer specific customer queries to use CC Teamer to identify the appropriate back office worker who could answer the question. The agent would then hand off the interaction to the knowledge worker. In this way, the customer query was usually answered in a single contact and customer satisfaction levels noticeably climbed. However, this system was not perfect; because the knowledge workers were not trained in sales techniques, they could successfully answer the customer queries but they did not close any deals. Customer satisfaction went up but revenues generated by the contact center began to fall.

Siam Commercial Bank quickly noticed this problem and identified the root cause. Due to the flexible infrastructure of the Alcatel-Lucent solution, the bank changed its collaborative processes. Customers are now conferenced in to conversations with both the experts and the agents. The agents and knowledge workers share customer information and documents through their desktops, while supervisors can review conferences in real-time and can also track activity through historical reporting. More importantly, the knowledge workers can solve customer issues and the sales-focused agents can close any sales opportunities, all in a single interaction. This keeps customer satisfaction high while allowing the bank to hit its revenue targets.

When this development is viewed in the abstract, Siam Commercial Bank does not appear to have broken any new ground. After all, for at least the last four years, contact center infrastructure vendors such as Avaya, Aspect Software and Cisco have been talking about breaking down the walls of the contact center, and building bridges for collaboration between contact center agents and other enterprise employees. Conceptually, what Siam Commercial Bank has accomplished is not new. Yet Datamonitor believes there are two key points that make this a truly notable implementation; the bank's geographical location and its flexibility in adapting to circumstances after the deployment.

Enterprises in emerging markets have often been quicker to adopt IP-based technologies, primarily because they did not have a massive built infrastructure that would need to be replaced. This allowed them to leapfrog similar companies in the mature markets. A similar function seems to be at play with Siam Commercial Bank: it is not that the idea of bringing together the enterprise and the contact center is new, it is that some of the most extensive real-world examples of making this happen have come from less saturated markets. In those markets, companies such as Siam Commercial Bank can quickly see the possibilities inherent in the 'dynamic enterprise' approach and have a nimble-enough mindset to actually go and create one.

In terms of flexibility, the Siam Commercial Bank case study is notable for the company's ability and willingness to deal with its initial miscalculation. The bank faced the unexpected consequences of higher customer satisfaction but lower revenues. It was then able to fix the problem quickly due to a sufficiently accommodating Alcatel-Lucent-based infrastructure and set of internal business processes. These two factors allowed the problem to be corrected without lowering customer satisfaction along the way.

The conservative contact center market needs to see proven successes before it slowly begins to shift towards new concepts and new technologies. Examples such as the Alcatel-Lucent-based deployment at Siam Commercial Bank will go a long way towards making this dynamic enterprise model more palatable to the wider market.

Ian Jacobs

http://www.datamonitor.com

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