These solutions have helped Lloyds TSB improve customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs through automation of some of its telephone banking calls.

PhoneBank Express has also achieved the highest customer satisfaction score of the company's telephone banking services. Based on Nortel's speech services, the bank's PhoneBank Express can handle more than 100,000 calls per day and processes 3.2 million transactions per month.

"Customer satisfaction is at the top of our priority list and the Nortel solutions have helped us boost levels of satisfaction and at the same time achieve cost savings," said John Carr, senior manager, Telephony Self Service, Lloyds TSB. "Our customers can contact us through the automated PhoneBank Express service or they can also choose to call our telephone banking centres to talk to an advisor. Our personal customers appreciate the free, quick and easy-to-use automated service as two million calls per month are proving."

"In addition, we are fully committed to Nortel and its speech technology as it forms a fundamental part of Lloyds TSB's move to one telephone number across all of our contact centre operations," Carr said. "Having one central, easy to remember number will make contacting us much easier for customers."

"We are pleased to see positive results from our continuing collaboration with Lloyds TSB and how its customers can benefit from these automated service offerings based on Nortel's speech technology," said Andy Dennahy, director, Multimedia Applications, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), Nortel. "This is another proof point on how reduced operational expenses can go hand-in-hand with first-class customer experience to make a real difference in today's business environments. As PhoneBank Express has proven, speech applications are now in everyday use and Nortel has the ability to deploy those on a large scale."