An ambitious programme of IT investment by high street bank
Abbey demands tight project management to deliver cost savings and
higher levels of service.
High street bank Abbey is planning to deploy a virtual call centre
running over its IP network in a bid to improve its customer
service.
Abbey has deployed an IP- based network to support banking
services, customer relationship management and IP telephony as part
of the bank's £125m refresh of its branch networks. The IP network
was completed in October 2003. Abbey is now rolling out
applications, one of which is a virtual call centre, which will
enhance business continuity provision and improve the flexibility
of its customer service.
Abbey aims to standardise its call centre technology to allow its
agents to work from any location. The project, due to be completed
by the end of 2005, will also support the new business structure of
the bank.
"The holy grail is to enable any agent in any location to support
the customer," said Bill Gibbons, director of technology services
and support at Abbey. "As part of this you can enhance business
continuity and disaster recovery because you can spread all your
calls and ensure there is no single physical point of
failure."
Gibbons declined to estimate the potential cost savings from the
call centre overhaul but Computer Weekly understands that savings
are likely to be £10m or more, in line with those achieved with
other large IT projects at Abbey.
Other benefits of the new call centre infrastructure, according to
Gibbons, include a simplification of IT, which will improve service
levels; easier integration between applications; and being able to
respond more quickly to the demands of the business.
The call centre overhaul is due to be completed by the end of 2005.
It will be run as a managed service and use a virtual private
network from BT Transform, which was installed in just five months
last year.
The VPN project involved 7,000 site visits to replace leased lines,
ISDN and ASDL with an IP VPN that can carry both data and voice
traffic. It supports 750 branches and 750,000 internal calls in
addition to 1.2 million calls from the public every month.
The internal telephone network is also being replaced by IP
telephony running between branches over the VPN.
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