Banque Saudi Fransi launches state-of-the-art banking services powered by Altitude Software

Bank with the "French Touch" Banque Saudi Fransi is a Saudi Arabian Joint Stock Company. It is affiliated with Credit Agricole Indosuez, a fully-fledged member of the Credit Agricole Group, the largest bank in France, and among the world's top ten banks by total equity. Over the years, Banque Saudi Fransi has demonstrated a sustainable pattern of growth that has established its current financial strength and leadership in the Saudi market. The bank's financials in 2002 have revealed an across-the-board growth of activities. Thus, total assets were in excess of SR 44.7 billion ($11.9 billion), a 12% increase compared to 2001. With over 60 branches currently spread throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Banque Saudi Fransi was in an ideal position to implement Altitude's customer interaction management (CIM) suite.

Putting in place a winning strategy Banque Saudi Fransi specifically needed a CIM solution to cultivate and nurture interactive, personalized customer relationships and achieve the following business objectives:

- Identify its most valuable customers
- Cross-sell and up-sell products and services at each interaction
- Develop the best mix of products and services
- Provide a consistent level of customer service through all interactions

"Our aim is to ensure that we provide our customers with world-class services at a time and place that is convenient to them," said Tareq Al Belali, Banque Saudi Fransi contact centre manager. "Technology had to be deployed in a way that is easy for our customers to use, improves their service experience and helps us provide a consistent customer service across all interaction channels." Banque Saudi Fransi selected the Altitude uCI solution after an extensive evaluation of competing contact centre software technologies. Altitude uCI is a contact centre software solution with full blended support for voice (inbound and outbound), IVR, email, web collaboration and chat.

The first phase of the contact centre solution deployment for Banque Saudi Fransi consisted in routing incoming interactions through an extremely intuitive interactive voice response (IVR) system designed to free agents and enable customers to serve themselves using voice menus and touch-tone phone. The system is fully integrated with a voice management application that provides intelligent handling of inbound and outbound calls through the use of computer telephony integration (CTI), enabling Banque Saudi Fransi's customers to seamlessly move from
self-service to assisted service on the phone.

The benefits
Today, Banque Saudi Fransi's contact centre is a 7/24 operation with customer service representatives that provide assistance to the bank's customers with personal loan schemes, credit cards, transaction history, advice on new BSF programs such as 'My Family' and Priority Banking services designed for a top segment of personal banking clients. Those programs are among Al Fransi's list of pioneering banking initiatives that have been developed over the last few years. Such initiatives have placed the Bank at the forefront of innovation among regional banks.

With the new contact centre software solution in place, BSF is able to improve its customer interaction experience, whether self-service or agent-assisted. The bank is specifically able to provide a new set of telebanking services including:

a. transfer funds between accounts
b. provide greater transaction history detail
c. offer English and Arabic language applications
d. agent skills based routing
e. automated fulfilment

In addition, the new system provides a central information repository, where BSF customer service representatives can view relevant and consistent customer data. Tracking customer activities allows the bank to find ways to cross-sell and up-sell products and services at each =
interaction with a customer. By setting up customer segmentation rules and providing relevant, timely information to customers, the bank is able to increase its share of each customer's business. 'The new system guides the front-end conversation for all callers, who are now able to complete a self-service transaction or at any time choose to be transferred to a live customer service representative," said Tareq Al Belali. 'This helps instil a customer-focused, and profit-focused strategy which enables us to make the most out of every single customer interaction,' he adds.

'We are delighted that Banque Saudi Fransi have selected our award-winning, innovative solution for this project,' said Riadh Boukhris, Altitude Software vice president Middle East, Africa and South Asia. 'Banque Saudi Fransi is a great example of a customer-centric financial services company that made a sensible choice to enhance their customer service and revenue-generation using Altitude's cost-effective, easy-to-use customer interaction management software suite'.