Unified approach to managing international customer service underpins successful market launch and business differentiation
Slough, UK (July 23, 2009) – eGain Communications Corporation (OTC BB: EGAN.OB), the leading provider of multichannel customer service and knowledge management software, today announced that Ivobank, a banking organisation that specialises in online payments and money transfers, has selected the eGain Service™ suite to power its customer service and support offerings. With the ability to support telephone, email, chat, SMS and self-service interactions, the solution ensures a unified multichannel and multilingual service experience for Ivobank’s growing local and international customer base.
Launched in 2008, Ivobank is an online bank that provides secure, convenient and competitively priced payment services to merchants and consumers across a range of Internet market sectors. Providing a high level of customer service was crucial not only for preventing the customer churn that is common in online banking, but also for developing Ivobank’s brand. Terry Chow, Senior Analyst at Ivobank, explained, “As our ability to deliver first-class customer service is essential to building our reputation within the industry, selecting the best contact centre technology was critical.”
Ivobank began looking for best-of-breed products to cover the full range of its service and support offering. Typical of an e-business, it needed everything—multiple languages, multiple channels, agility, flexibility and scalability—while containing costs. “We wanted a flexible solution that would enable speed to market and help us cope with rapid changes in direction whilst keeping costs controlled. It was also important that it allows us to scale as our customer base and portfolio grows. Comprehensive multilingual capabilities were another must, because multilingual customer service adds another layer of service differentiation,” continued Chow.
According to Chow, the flexibility came with an ease of configuration that clearly supported Ivobank’s ‘rapid response’ market strategy, “As an example, we recently added a completely new line of business within our contact centre to take advantage of customer acquisition opportunities in a number of territories incorporating some pretty complex automated workflows – we were able to complete the underlying eGain design, testing and full implementation completely in-house in less than 14 hours. Very few products will give you that flexibility and speed, which is where eGain has been fantastic for us.”
Ivobank supports customers across seven countries and five languages from a single contact centre, which uses eGain Mail™ and eGain Chat™, key products in the eGain Service™ suite, to manage email and live chat customer service, respectively. The common multichannel foundation, eGain OpenCIH Platform™, ensures that the same knowledge base, customer information and interaction history is available to all agents, enabling informed responses for every query, irrespective of the interaction language or channel.
A sophisticated routing capability was also a key vendor selection criterion for Ivobank. The ability to update workflows in a live system was missing from most competing products. However, with eGain Service™, Ivobank is able to easily design, test, and go live with a new workflow without disrupting customer service operations. Incoming chats and emails are routed to agent groups on the basis of language and subject matter. “We’ve even got the incoming email workflow doing some clever stuff like working out the inbound language for itself in order to send an auto-acknowledgement in the same language,” said Chow.
Ivobank makes extensive use of eGain Data Adapters™ to meet another requirement, which Chow calls “interoperability”. The Ivobank portfolio of services is supported by as many as 40 different technology products. Data adapters enable seamless two-way integration with data in external systems, making the eGain Service™ a key building block in Ivobank’s technology platform.
Security is particularly important in financial institutions. Ivobank uses the eGain Secure Email™ module to offer customers an authenticated web portal with secure email inboxes, an emerging best practice in the financial services industry for handling confidential emails.
Ivobank plans to add web self-service capabilities to their eGain Service™ deployment. As Chow said, “In a start-up situation, you can never really predict accurately what your customers will demand – key to servicing success is the ability to rapidly and accurately capture this knowledge in a manner that will allow us to build a cohesive, user-friendly and highly available customer service infrastructure. Here, the eGain Service™ ticks all the right boxes for us”.
Andrew Mennie, General Manager of EMEA, eGain concluded, “Starting up a business in this climate is difficult. With this in mind, Ivobank understood that the right technology choice could give it market differentiation from established competitors. Customer service is a big part of this. Ivobank’s decision to implement a complete suite of customer service and contact centre software to set up a unified multichannel contact centre rather than a traditional call centre, ensured they will not only experience seamless cross-channel customer experience but also end-to-end service process efficiencies, which is crucial in today’s tight economic times.”
About eGain
eGain (OTC BB: EGAN.OB) is the leading provider of multichannel customer service and knowledge management software for in-house or on-demand deployment. For over a decade, hundreds of world’s largest companies have relied on eGain to transform their traditional call centers, help desks, and web customer service operations into multichannel Customer Interaction Hubs (CIH). Based on the Power of One™ – the concept of one unified platform for customer interaction and knowledge management – eGain solutions help improve customer experience, optimize end-to-end service process, increase sales, and enhance contact center performance.
Headquartered in Mountain View, California, eGain has operating presence in North America, EMEA and APAC. To learn more about us, visit www.eGain.com or call our offices: +1-800-821-4358 (US), +44-(0)-1753-464646 (EMEA), or +91-(0)-20-6608-9200 (APAC).
About Ivobank (www.ivobank.com)
Ivobank is an online bank providing secure and reliable payments and money transfer services designed to meet the needs of online businesses and customers. Ivobank offers competitive rates of interest on funds held. Ivobank is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority.
For further information contact:
Jennifer Manning/Carina Parmar
Cohesive Communications
01291626200 [email protected]
