Automation the contact centre processes is one of the main problems to be solved by any modern bank interested in main­taining and increasing of its market share. The existing and potential client loyalty to a particular financial and credit institution depends on clear and prompt answers to customers' questions, tips and suggestions. NBJ interviewed Sales Executive of Tieto Company Pavel SALMIN who told about integrator's role helping to solve these issues for banks.

NBJ: Pavel, in your opinion what is the role of a contact centre built correctly and effi­ciently for a bank?

P. SALMIN: On the back of rapid develop­ment of bank services and its popularity among population a contact centre is one of the most convenient and effective chan­nels of remote servicing (both for a bank and a client) and it largely determines the bank competitiveness at the market.

The downside is the cost incurred by a financial and credit institution to en­sure a specified level of quality. However, the cost of customer servicing in a contact centre is always lower than in offices and retail outlets.

The development of business pro­cesses in many banks' call-centres is fo­cused on their transformation from cost centres into profit centres. This develop­ment is achieved through telemarket­ing services, collection, sales at incoming calls handling.

NBJ: How long has the company been developing the solutions to optimize business processes at the contact centres of financial institutions?

P. SALMIN: The history of business solu­tions development for process optimi­zation in a contact centre lasts in Tieto Company for more than 10 years. It start­ed in 2003, when the team of Telecom Design (which was incorporated in Tie-to Corporation in 2008) developed one of the first call-centre operator applica­tions at the Russian market. Thus, when most institutions were still choosing an infrastructure for a call-centre to pur­chase, our experts had already begun to develop business solutions that would fa­cilitate the work of operator services to the maximum.

NBJ: How long, in your experience, does it take to implement the solution, allow­ing to optimize the call centre work? What factors influence the time costs at the implementation of such projects?

P. SALMIN: A project schedule is primarily dependent on the number of involved busi­ness processes, systems and data sources. For example, during the project of a uni­fied agent application implementation it may be revealed during the stage of re­quirements capture and analysis that cus­tomer information is stored in several bank sources. For the successful implementa­tion of the project, we propose to perform a separate integration and data quality as­surance subproject.

Taking into account actual situation, the terms of agreement for technical spe­cification and integration requirements a project may last for three months and for six months.

NBJ: It's not a secret that similar solutions are offered at the market by a number of companies. What are the competitive advantages of Tieto? Give us specific exam­ples if possible.

P. SALMIN: The most of the market compa­nies develop their proposals on the basis of solutions from well-known vendors, each of which covers his part of functionality.

Tieto Company is also a manufac­turer partner and owns competences and solution implementation experience from the best practices - contact centres, speech technologies, analytics, WFM, CRM, etc.

But Tieto acts as a vendor itself. In par­ticular, it has its own unique set of integra­tion modules to the most common contact centre solutions. This gives us many new features that we implement for the solutions and projects.

For example, the idea of our prod­uct "Unified Queue" is that Tieto mod­ule can track the agent status at a call-centre and manage them. If a part of the agents is in waiting status, the system ac­cording to configurable rules may provide for an operator a task from the banking system or a web-message to process and as­sign the appropriate status of the contact centre system during the handling time.

The modern call-centre uses many different solutions, therefore, an effect of "scrappy automation" appears, when differ­ent business processes and data are main­tained by separate systems of different man­ufacturers. Therefore, additional optimiza­tion opportunities may be provided if all systems and processes work as a single in­strument under control of configurable business logic.

This principle makes the basis of a unified agent application solution. Tie-to solution module, first of all controls the call distribution system, and secondly, in­teracts with the Bank information systems (e.g., CRM, ticket system or any database), and thirdly, provides managers and admin­istrators the ability to customize business rules, screen forms and access rights.

An operator is provided with an uni­fied user interface, which displays all the information and tools necessary for a call handling process. The modular solution structure allows the inclusion in the agent application only those tools that are re­ally needed in each case and depending on the set of other systems used in the bank - a single customer card, call histo­ry, knowledge base, dynamic scenario of servicing, special offers for a client, web-messages, applications and performance tasks, the survey module or other system functionality.

The effect of such solution introduc­tion is the request processing and oper­ator training period reduction, so there is no need to train agents to work in each of the systems.

The user interface of our application is based on web-technology and can be configured and optimized in terms of us­ability, which may significantly improve the efficiency of operators. Quite often the interfaces of business systems in banks are designed for experts and analysts, not for the call-centre employees.

We would like to tell you about BPM (Business Process Management) module used in our solutions. This element of the system allows us describe in a visual de­signer all the logic of business processes and provide its implementation within the system. For example, in our proposed so­lution for Debt Recovery collection servic­es, BPM module allows create and provide the bank operation strategy for a loan at all stages of collection process.

Thus, Tieto has all the elements that are needed for business processes optimi­zation projects: integration modules, user interface and business process engine. This allows us meet the growing needs of customers, even when this functionality is not presented at the market of available solutions.