In a major overhaul of its communications infrastructure for multiple branch offices, Anchor Bank has picked the all-in-one IP communications software suite, Customer Interaction Center (CIC), offered by Interactive Intelligence.
Aiming to reduce costs and enhance customer service, the privately-held bank will replace its current Nortel PBX’s (News - Alert) with the CIC to connect its 16 branch offices located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., and its Wayzata-based headquarters.
“We evaluated solutions from Nortel and ShoreTel (News - Alert), but we chose CIC because its single-platform, SIP-based architecture with both contact center and business user applications would enable us to most simply and cost-effectively consolidate communications for our multiple branch offices,” said Anchor Bank's director of information services, David Marks, in a press release.
CIC’s standards-based, single-platform architecture, which runs a host of contact center automation and enterprise IP telephony applications, was designed to eliminate the cost and complexity introduced by multipoint products.
With the implementation of CIC, not only will bank employees gain access to features like unified messaging, presence management, automatic call distribution and multichannel recording, they will also be able to take advantage of mobile communications.
“We plan to use CIC’s find-me/follow-me feature so employees are more accessible,” said Marks. “This will increase their productivity, while further enhancing customer service.”
Marks also hopes CIC will provide a gateway for enhanced communications via online chatting and social media. “Following our initial deployment, we'd like to expand further on the ways customers can interact with us such as through Web chat and social media channels,” Marks said. “The great thing about CIC is that we can do this by simply turning on a license key -- no costly hardware upgrades or lengthy deployment cycles.”
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Tammy Wolf is a TMCnet web editor. She covers a wide range of topics, including IP communications and information technology. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Jennifer Russell