IBM Signs Call Center Agreement

IBM (News - Alert) announced that it signed agreements in September with the Chiba Bank Ltd., The Hokkoku Bank Ltd. and the Daishi Bank Ltd. for building a Call Center System which will be used by all three banks.

 

The agreement between the banks was part of the TSUBASA project which was meant to examine the system integration between the five banks including Chiba Bank, Daishi Bank, Hokkoku Bank, the Chuugoku Bank Ltd and The Iyo Bank Ltd. This initiative is expected to create a new value system by the open cooperation including several regions.

 

The name TSUBASA itself means “wing” in the Japanese language.

 

Chiba Bank, Daishi Bank and Hokkoku Bank had already agreed for such a collaboration development for the call center system as their contracts were already due for renewal. IBM Japan proposes to launch the system development starting this month. The system will become operational from November next year at all the banks. This system will be in use up to March 2010.

 

The Call Center System will be developed by using the “IBM Channel Sharing Center Service”, an outsourcing service created by IBM Global Business Services. This enables sharing of unified channels of Internet and voice for several financial institutions.

 

The combination of the system infrastructures of the telephone switching devices and servers enable enhanced operational quality besides decreasing maintenance cost of the system. If the collaboration agreement was not in place the banks would have spent individually on the development using their own systems. This becomes more expensive.

 

However, the new collaboration agreement for the development will reduce the costs involved in development for all the banks besides helping them achieve high flexibility. This helps manage future system enhancement for new products and services.

 

IBM Japan provides system operation and application maintenance services to the IBM Channel Sharing Center Service environment for handling telephone devices and transactions in call centers of financial institutions. By using both function types of internet and voice, customer service is improved by connecting the internet and call center. IBM further plans to develop and extend services of Call Center System for other banks.

 

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