NBO improves operational efficiencies expands contact centre operations using Altitude Software

National Bank of Oman (NBO), the local bank in the Sultanate of Oman, has extended its contact centre operations to handle the fast-paced growth of its telebanking operations, the company said.

Located in Muscat, NBO’s contact centre is powered by the Altitude Software solution which provided the Omani financial institution with IP contact centre features, such as voice portal, and a unified centralised monitoring, queuing, routing and reporting.

According to the National Bank of Oman, the firm’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 recognised as a premier retail, corporate and private banking institution by offering innovative products and services, and using state-of-the-art service delivery systems,” said Salaam Said Al Shaksy, CEO, NBO.

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, the company added.

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.

According to NBO, the specific benefits experienced by the bank since the IP Contact Centre solution implementation include 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 and improved customer retention as the skills-based routing tool enables the distribution of inbound interactions intelligently to a specialist agent.

NBO representatives said that the bank 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 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 centralised 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, president, Altitude Software, MENA. “National Bank of Oman is a very good example of the high value customers can receive by using Altitude uCI, not only optimising cost and efficiency but also driving significant revenue growth,”he concluded.