BOCOM will deploy 2500 lines of Avaya IVR system in its Shanghai headquarters and several regional offices. In the future, the bank will roll out the system to other major offices throughout the country. The Avaya solution will enable BOCOM to deliver round the clock services and to free contact center staff to focus on more important work and more important customers.

Using synthesized or pre-recorded speech, the system can respond to an incoming call, request specific information from the caller and provide information or services based on data from the caller. With the help of advanced IP communication technologies, clients will be able to interact with the bank's contact center through multi-channels, at any time, and from any location. The system also supports speech enabling of existing web based applications using VoiceXML2.0, which gives businesses greater flexibility in how they build, deploy and manage speech applications.

BOCOM decided to upgrade its call center to a converged communications platform to more efficiently serve its customers with faster feedback, unified brand experiences, and more personalized services. The bank is keen to adopt leading IVR technologies to build a self service platform. Avaya was selected after rigorous testing and selection. The Avaya solution demonstrated outstanding technical features in terms of stability, scalability and interoperability, as well as strong support for the bank's business needs.

Avaya Interactive Voice Response automates common enterprise interactions and fulfillment between a business and its customers. It supports a variety of applications from stand-alone network connected self service applications to tight integration with a call center. By supporting international standards-based interfaces, the Avaya system can work in a large number of different configurations, and also makes it easy for application development.

During a self-service interaction, Avaya Interactive Response can collect basic call information and customer interaction data and then pass on this information to be processed by Avaya's intelligent routing solutions, allowing the bank to uniformly apply customer segmentation and routing instructions.

Luo Jun, Director of CRM Business, Avaya China, said: "It is our great pleasure to partner with BOCOM, one of the most prestigious banks in the country. This is another testament to our strength in IVR technologies and, more broadly, contact centers. As a leader in enterprise communications, we are committed to help banking customers bring together business applications and communications applications, so that they will be more efficient and agile in serving their clients.

The IVR system of BOCOM will be built on the Avaya Converged Communications platform which comprises of the S8700 media server and G650 media gateway.