A wholly-owned subsidiary of HSBC Holdings, HSBC Bank is one of the
world's largest banking and financial services organisations. It
has 6,500 offices in 78 countries and territories
The problem
In 1999, HSBC in the UK offered
customers digital TV banking, followed by the launch of Internet
banking in 2000. It needed to provide support for customers
accessing those services. A major concern was that any sensitive
customer information sent out by automated processes would be kept
secure.
Company requirement
HSBC wanted a solution
that would make it easy for customers to provide feedback on
services, directing enquiries to its e-mail-based customer support
channel and help to manage the stream of incoming support
questions. It would have to automate responses to the high volume
of customer enquiries and integrate with existing databases. A high
degree of precision was required to ensure the correctly
categorised e-mail responses were sent out.
With its extensive geographic coverage, the bank also wanted a
solution that would include a global roll-out that could be
translated across all languages.
The solution
HSBC picked Amacis to provide
support and implemented its Visibility e-mail management tool and
Text Analyser to automate e-mail responses as much as possible. A
content analysis engine forms the core of the Visibility package.
This can categorise unstructured messages, route them to the most
appropriate person within the bank and suggest a pre-formatted
response. Web forms have been developed to address technical
support issues and enable Internet banking customers to report
feedback. HSBC has also expanded its e-mail support to specific
business units looking for effective ways to interact with
customers, other than traditional paper and fax channels.
The result
After monitoring the system for a
year, HSBC says it has enjoyed considerable savings as a result of
opening the e-mail channel and processing customer enquiries more
quickly. Many customers now contact the bank through e-mail, rather
than telephone, send fewer letters in the post and visit branch
offices less often, all of which frees up HSBC representatives'
time.
The amount of time spent resolving technical support queries has
also fallen: whereas it used to take HSBC support agents an average
of 15 minutes on the telephone to solve a detailed technical
support query, it now takes Amacis 10-12 minutes to resolve any new
problems that crop up. Once Amacis is trained to understand a
problem, that resolution time drops to three minutes.