Introduction
The organisation is a co-operative bank that was originally started as a credit society in 1918 and was converted into an urban bank in 1966. It has also tied up with Small Industries Development Bank of India for credit lined capital subsidy scheme. Rewarded by multiple agencies for its performance, the bank aims to delights its customers with simplified and valuable banking solutions using advanced technologies, cybersecurity practices, and customer relationship management systems.
To handle the increasing volume of calls from its customers, the bank was looking for a flexible, scalable, and future-ready IP-based voice solution. It wanted to keep the organisation’s telephony system cost-effective and easy-to-maintain by avoiding the deployment of multiple public switched telephone network (PSTN) lines. Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS) offerd its Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunk solution with facilities of auto-failover for strong business continuity. Our solution is also backed by a comprehensive service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing unmatched uptime.
The senior members from the bank’s IT team watched a quick demonstration of the product online and made a note of all its features. After comparing our SIP solution with a few other alternatives in the market, the bank decided to subscribe to our service.
Business Challenges
The bank had been using a legacy telephony setup comprising PSTN lines that were difficult to maintain and costly to scale. The customer service team had to answer an increasing volume of calls and could not afford to keep customers waiting in queue for long. It was therefore essential to upgrade the infrastructure for voice services. Also, the incoming calls had to be routed to specific departments for quick answers.
To keep bill payments simple it was necessary to liaise with only vendor for the service and the bank wanted a customer-centric SLA to back the solution. In addition, the specific requirements to be addressed were:
- Ability to reroute services to a backup data line if the primary link supporting the calls was down for some time
- A set up that is easy to scale without investing in bulky phone systems and complex wiring
- Freedom to make and receive calls from / on any platform
While upgrading to a new solution for its telephony, the bank also wanted some scope for savings on the bills to be paid.
TTBS Solution
Our solution architects deployed the SIP Trunk service for the bank. Every single link could be used for 20 to 1500 simultaneous calls. The new configuration helped to replace multiple PSTN lines with a single line for handling multiple inbound and outbound conversations.
The larger scope for call volume handling enabled customers to instantly connect with agents instead of waiting in queue.
As it was an IP-based solution, SIP Truck was smoothly integrated with an IVR and calls could therefore be routed to specialists handling queries for different services.
TTBS was able to meet the bank’s expectations on various fronts:
- With SIP, calls were automatically rerouted through an alternative link and also to employees’ mobile if any downtime incident affected the primary link.
- Being a digital telephony system, SIP Truck did not involve physical infrastructure and with every additional link the organisation could scale its call handling capacity for up to 1500 calls.
- The calls could be handled on any telephone equipment including Android, iOS and Windows devices – this facilitated work-from-home whenever required.
Switching to SIP Trunk also helped the bank to materialise some savings on its monthly phone bills. It could make long-distance outgoing calls cost-effectively and had to pay lower rentals. The costs of maintaining hardware-based infrastructure were also eliminated.
TTBS provides SLA-backed network service availability of 99.5% and the mean-timeto-resolve complaints is only 4 hours. As per the SLA, in the unlikely case of service commitment breach, service credits are provided to the customer.