Vocalis earns more interest from Abbey National

Abbey National upgrade, expand and introduce new services to their telebanking system

Vocalis, the Cambridge, UK based speech recognition and telephony solutions company are pleased to announce an order from Logica for Abbey National, the UK’s fifth largest bank, to upgrade and expand their telebanking system.

Included in the circa £0.5m package are two new flexible and powerful Vocalis interactive voice response (IVR) servers, to help meet the growing demand for the telebanking system, along with upgrades to the existing servers. These improvements will result in faster call processing, greater call handling capacity and the ability to introduce new services for all Abbey National banking and credit card customers. Recently introduced services include the facility for customers to request a spoken mini statement service, which announces the details of the last ten account transactions. Abbey National are also one of the few banks to offer the facility to allow customers to pay their credit card bills through the automated service. There is also a dedicated link for business banking customers, this ensures that, should business customers need to speak to someone, they are automatically routed through to an agent specialising in business accounts.

Jonathan Hart, Sales Director at Vocalis Group plc, comments "We are delighted to continue to provide the Abbey National with the latest telecommunications technology for business. This ensures they can offer their customers the best possible service. Using Vocalis and Logica technology more customers benefit from a quicker, more efficient service, with the easy to use options of speech technology or touch tone driven menus."

"The Abbey National telebanking system has continued to grow rapidly since its introduction. We currently have over half a million Abbey National customers registered to use this service and this number is increasing all the time." John Hancock, Manager Telephone Banking Development at Abbey National explains " The convenience of the telebanking service results in new users joining and greater use by those already registered. We are pleased to be able to increase and improve our telebanking service so more customers can take advantage of the benefits it has to offer."

Chris Edmett, Account Manager at Logica, adds "We have worked with Vocalis to offer speech driven call centre applications to a range of clients. We are pleased with the continued success of the Abbey National. This order for infrastructure investment by Abbey National demonstrates the success of this type of automated service. The Vocalis and Logica technology provides the complete easy to use telebanking solution which keeps Abbey National customers coming back for more. "