According to S1 Corporation, which is implementing the Customer Interaction Solution for BankWest, the technology "will provide more personalised service for customers making requests from a range of incoming channels including phone, wireless, email and the Web". The system is expected to be fully online later this year with a pilot implementation expected in the next four-to-six months.
As part of the implementation, S1's Customer Interaction includes Virtual Customer Service Representatives, which utilise Natural Language technology developed by Edify, an S1 subsidiary. The technology is designed to "increase the speed and effectiveness of customer sales and service through the automation of customer contact, both written and verbal".
Chris Whitehead, general manager of BankWest's Emerging Businesses and Systems, explained to ZDNet Australia that one of things that drove BankWest to adopt this technology was the ability to integrate multi-channel services to customers.
"This technology can be used across voice and data-based channels," explained Whitehead. "We believe this level of integration and seamlessness is unique. It incorporates features such as customer contact history, so we have a record across all channels of customer interaction allowing customers to switch channels even during a transaction. It also includes workflow components to ensure we respond as promised to service requests."
Virtual Customer Service Representative (Virtual CSR) technology, according to Whitehead, "provides 2 great capabilities". The first is the ability to use the natural language recognition aspect of the Virtual CSR to "route an interaction (voice or data-based) to the right person first time".
Although confident of the technology, BankWest will still continue to analyse the technology over time as it operates before fully commiting to the system. "We would do a lot of analysis before using fully-automated responses but believe this will evolve over time," said Whitehead.
The second important capability of the system is its interaction with existing data and infrastructure for important marketing plans. "Through interaction with our data warehouse and campaign management systems [we have the ability] to provide 'real-time' targetted cross-sell opportunities," said Whitehead.
BankWest's decision to implement a CRM (Customer Relations Management) solution was not a simple one. It took two years of analysing the CRM marketplace before the bank finally made its decision.
For BankWest, S1/Edify's proposal was good, but as Whitehead sees it, the benefit to BankWest and S1/Edify is mutual. "S1/Edify are very keen to work with a responsive development partner such as BankWest as an early deployment opportunity," explained Whitehead.
When the system comes online sometime later this year, BankWest expects to have a significant advantage over its competitors. Whitehead expanded by saying: "We expect that our system will be relatively much less complex than [our] competitors, who have a diverse range of channel-specific solutions whilst we plan a single multi-channel technology. This will allow us to be much more sophisticated over time in its use."
