Why SIP trunking is a crucial tool for better banking – Communications Q&A
Metro Bank is a relatively new player on the UK’s high street in the financial services market. Granted a licence by the FSA in 2010, it became the first institution in over 100 years to join an industry dominated by old names. From its launch, Metro Bank has focused on offering customers superior service and a convenient banking experience.
Metro Bank wants to expand in every way, offering its brand of friendly and convenient banking to more and more people. A big part of achieving that goal is how easy it will be for customers to be able to speak to colleagues, so a high standard of communications services is crucial. Unify spoke to Luis Aguiar, Infrastructure Delivery Team Leader, at Metro Bank about the positive impact Gamma has had on their business.
Q&A
A new communications solution is a big change. What was the impetus for Metro Bank to switch?
A couple of years ago we started on a telephony migration project to improve our systems. We decided to move to a hosted contact centre platform with a company called Interactive Intelligence and, at the same time, to improve our Lync back office system. The aim was to give our customers a better experience, and to move onto a robust and scalable platform that Metro Bank could grow with.
When did Gamma come into the process?
We had successfully worked with Gamma on an earlier project. And when we were setting up the contact centres, Interactive Intelligence recommended that we look at their SIP trunks. We wanted the solution right away, and also decided to use SIP for Lync.
What were the priorities for your new system?
Everything was focused on supporting our contact centre colleagues who, with even better technology, could deliver superior customer service. Business continuity was also important. We had to install a resilient solution so that our customers can always speak to us whenever they need to.
Meanwhile for the back office systems we needed a solution that could scale with us. We plan to grow the business substantially by 2020 and wanted telephony that would enable that growth.
How have things changed since the introduction of SIP?
Telephony in our contact centres is now better integrated with service systems, allowing us to bring up customer files quicker, saving both customer and colleagues’ time. In the wider business, the amount of infrastructure we are using for our back office systems has completely downsized, and we are saving money by not having to maintain that. Our SIP can also talk natively to other tech systems, with no hardware in the middle.
