S1 Enterprise, a division of S1 Corporation (Nasdaq: SONE) and a leading provider of multichannel financial services software, today announced an agreement with Zions Bancorporation to implement the S1 Call Center application across six of Zions Bancorporation's affiliate banks.
In 2006, the $53-billion, Salt Lake City-based holding company launched an initiative to standardize on more current technologies and chose the S1 Enterprise Platform, built on open J2EE technologies.
"We feel it is important to get all our channels onto one framework," said Carl Hoburg, Zions Bancorporation's senior vice president, information technology. "We need easily accessible information no matter how the customer reaches out to one of our affiliate banks, and we want each bank to have the ability to share services across channels without repeatedly rewriting and maintaining code."
In the first phase of the project, rolled out in October 2007, the objective was to provide a superior contact management solution for commercial lending officers responsible for each bank's most profitable portfolio. With contact management in place on the S1 Enterprise Platform, Zions Bancorporation is now bringing on an additional line of business and delivery channel by replacing its internally developed call center software with S1 Call Center, which also resides on the S1 Enterprise platform.
"With the implementation of S1 Call Center, our agents will no longer have to master multiple applications to handle our customers' needs," said Dianne Wynne, executive vice president, enterprise customer service for Zions Bancorporation. "The new solution will give them one-click access to complete information. We expect training costs to decline and customer satisfaction to increase."
S1 Call Center's built-in referral management capabilities will also enable Zions Bancorporation's 350 agents in three centers to efficiently refer opportunities to other areas of the bank. Because many call center referrals are for Internet banking, this is expected to reduce calls and move customers to a more cost effective way of doing business.
"Zions Bancorporation recognizes that an integrated, multichannel approach that reveals to bank employees the entire customer relationship from all channels can help a financial institution reduce costs, gain efficiencies and increase revenues," said William A. Proctor, senior vice president and general manager of S1 Enterprise's branch and call center product set. "With the addition of S1 Call Center, Zions will be one step closer to realizing the multichannel vision."