Teachers Mutual Bank to introduce video-conferencing

Teachers Mutual Bank is planning to roll out video-conferencing in the coming year in order to provide more of its 166,000 members with face-to-face services.

With just five branches (one in Perth, one in Canberra and three in New South Wales), the bank is heavily dependent on the phone to support customers. Around three quarters of Teachers Mutual's 600,000 interactions with customers each year are inbound calls.

Supporting the bank's 440 staff, including 85 contact centre personnel, is Interactive Intelligence's Customer Interaction Centre, which manages how the bank handles all inbound calls.

The bank is currently upgrading to version 4.0 of that software, which will allow the bank to introduce outbound dialling and SMS services, according to Gerard Smith, senior manager of ebusiness and the contact centre.

Smith said that, having launched webchat, the bank was looking to introduce videochat within the next year. It would ideally be available from within both the bank's mobile app and website, both of which are about to be redeveloped.

Around 120,000 of the bank's customers are currently registered as mobile banking users.

He said that, although the bank had five branches, along with mobile brokers and lenders, videoconferencing would allow Teachers Mutual to close the gap for all customers and significantly "change the hours of operation for us."

At present Teachers Mutual runs its contact centre from 8am to 7pm but has to deal with spikes during term times at school recess, lunch periods and at the end of the school day.

The ability for teachers to have out-of-hours video-conferences would, Smith acknowledged, "add complexity to our business" but also allow the bank to compete more effectively with other more extensively branched financial institutions.