National Bank of Oman Enhances Operational Efficiencies with Best-in-class Contact Centre

July 19, 2011 - PRLog -- National Bank of Oman (NBO), the first local bank in the Sultanate of Oman, has extended its contact centre operations to handle the fast-paced growth of its telebanking operations. Located in Muscat, NBO’s contact centre is powered by the Altitude Software solution which provided the Omani financial institution with a wealth of advanced IP contact centre features, such as voice portal, and a unified centralized monitoring, queuing, routing and reporting.

Banking on customer service excellence

National Bank of Oman’s increased contact centre capacity was necessary to meet strong customer demand. The contact centre today handles an average of 3,000 customer interactions per day and operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. One of the main objectives of building a best-in-class contact centre was to increase operational efficiencies and cement NBO’s image of excellence in the region.

National Bank of Oman (NBO), the first local bank in the Sultanate of Oman, was founded in 1973 and is one of the leading banks in Oman. The bank serves its customers in Oman through 70 branches and 177 ATMs and CCDMs. NBO offers a complete range of corporate, retail, Islamic, and investment banking services. “Our aim is to continue enhancing the Bank’s profile and reputation in the Gulf region and to be recognized as a premier retail, corporate and private banking institution by offering innovative products and services, and using state-of-the-art service delivery systems,” commented  Mr. Salaam Said Al Shaksy, NBO Chief Executive Officer.

Delivering tangible benefits

Using Altitude solutions NBO’s service representatives are able to answer customer inquiries regarding the bank’s various products and services, such as AL KANZ savings account or the AL AMIYAL Exclusive Credit Card in partnership with Oman Air or Al MANZEL Housing Loans.

In addition to handling advanced intelligent inbound routing and outbound dialing, the Altitude Contact Centre suite enables NBO to communicate with customers via email, text message, fax or through rich self-service voice applications. “With our significant commitment to customer service excellence, Altitude Software provides us with a critical tool for managing key interactions with our customers,” added Al Shaksy.

Specific benefits experienced by the Oman-based bank since the IP Contact Centre solution implementation includes the following:

- Reduced Average Handling Time (AHT) by authenticating customers through the Voice Portal prior to delivering the call to the agent.
- Reduced costs by providing the capacity to service mass customers at the contact centre and not at the bank branches
- Reduced time and cost of generating manual reports regarding the overall activity of National Bank of Oman’s customer service operations
- Reduced training expenses and improved agent productivity
- Improved customer retention as the skills-based routing tool enables the distribution of inbound interactions intelligently to a specialist agent

The Altitude uCI (Unified Customer Interaction) suite has a ten year plus track record of outstanding results in contact centers worldwide, having won more than 40 Industry Awards for Innovation and Performance in more recent years. It has also been included by Gartner in the industry Magic Quadrants since 2000. Altitude uCI´s most valuable asset is the possibility to easily and quickly  create and change CRM Services and Campaigns thanks to its Unified Design Studio, Open Desktop, Routing, Dialler, Voice Portal, Monitoring, Reporting, Workforce and Integration Server.

Call and screen recording provides Business Intelligence

National Bank of Oman also needed to be able to access a past call, if necessary, to clear up any confusion that might arise between its CSRs and customers regarding a specific transaction. Therefore, a VoIP recording solution, powered by Spescom Datavoice technology, has been integrated in the project.

The solution provides real-time recording, storage and retrieval of pure IP telephony sessions. It is fully integrated with the Cisco IP network and Altitude’s IP Contact Centre suite.  Call recording technology enables NBO supervisors to trigger recording based on the content of the call. It also includes centralized archiving enabling supervisors to access recordings from any location at any time.

“An increasing number of financial institutions throughout the GCC have embraced the Altitude uCI suite as a flexible, cost-effective contact centre solution that provides high value and delivers immediate results,” concluded Riadh Boukhris, Altitude Software President Middle East and North Africa. "National Bank of Oman is a very good example of the high value customers can receive by using Altitude uCI, not only optimizing cost and efficiency but also driving significant revenue growth."

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Altitude Software (www.altitude.com) is the leader of unified customer interaction solutions, managing dynamic contact centres independently of platforms since 1993. With about 900 customers in 60 countries, Altitude strives for customer satisfaction and is ISO 9001 certified for its worldwide support. Altitude Software has won 40+ industry awards and it has been included by Gartner in the industry Magic Quadrants since 2000. “Altitude uCI” (unified customer interaction) is a software suite that manages in real time enterprise functions like Customer Service, Help Desk, Collections, Telesales, Surveys, etc. It is unique in accelerating the creation of services and campaigns, thanks to the unified design studio, routing, dialler, voice portal, desktop front-end, monitoring and analytics. Altitude Software can be reached at +971 4 391 8880 or emailed to info.mena@altitude.com