IBM to aid HDFC Bank customer care

New Delhi: IBM on Thursday announced that HDFC Bank Limited has selected it for an industry-first information management software project designed to help HDFC rapidly enhance customer care and identify new business opportunities.

Using the new software developed by IBM’s research unit the bank will be able to make full use of the customer feedback received from emails and phone calls from among its 535 branches in 300 cities.

This feedback will be analyzed and the business insight can be extracted, enabling the bank to better respond to customer complaints and suggestions spread across the HDFC's computer systems.

The IBM solution automatically correlates incoming information with existing customer data and other business intelligence sources and provides insight into changing customer needs and banking trends.

This real-time analysis enables HDFC Bank to quickly respond to emerging customer demands, capitalize on unexpected opportunities, and deliver a higher-level of personalized service.

"Working with IBM has enabled us to unlock useful knowledge and derive tremendous value out of the customer information already being captured across our organisation," HDFC Bank’s information technology head C N Ram said.

"The ability to associate this information with emerging customer needs will help our bank deliver superior service to our more than 10 million customers and will be a massive competitive differentiator for us."

Building upon the successful solution developed for HDFC Bank and other new technologies developed by IBM research, IBM is delivering new software solutions to help organizations like HDFC Bank access, analyze and deliver the right information in the right context to optimize business processes.

These solutions will deliver increased business insight by combining structured and unstructured information using text analytics to turn content into information that can be more readily leveraged by users and applications.

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The offerings, based on IBM OmniFind search technology, will also provide clients with new ways to use semantics and enterprise search, introducing software for analyzing all kinds of content, including text, voice and even images and video.

"Through a combination of research technology, internal development and acquisitions, IBM has put together the industry's most complete set of technologies in the market for delivering new levels of business insight," IBM Content Discovery Solutions director Ponani Gopalakrishnan said.

"These offerings will enable new innovative uses of content that address common challenges around finding information needed to improve customer service, address product and service issues, and identify new business opportunities."

Banking on information

The solution IBM designed for HDFC rapidly categorizes and manages a wide variety of customer e-mails and calls on numerous subjects, such as complaints, billing questions or other types of inquiries, and enables identification of specific issues associated with each inquiry such as late payment, service charges or interest rates.

The solution also automatically assesses the sentiment of the customer to determine their level of concern or satisfaction, and identifies the top keywords mentioned throughout the content.

By automatically combining structured and unstructured information, HDFC Bank can provide call center agents with a more complete history of all customer activity so they are aware of information that has already been shared through previous interactions. It also enables HDFC Bank to generate new contextual and actionable insights that can be used to automate tasks, enhance up-selling and cross-selling opportunities, and improve agent performance.

"This project with HDFC Bank is another example of IBM India Research Laboratory working with clients to generate new technologies to solve some of their most pressing business needs," said Swarup Choudhury, director IBM Financial Services Sector.

IBM will offer a new solution for analyzing customer feedback found in structured and unstructured information in early 2007.