The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia is establishing a contact center with 350 seats in its own seven-storey building located in the Bank’s Gulele branch on Swaziland Street.
The contact center, which will enable the customers of the Bank to have their questions answered by the employees that are trained to do so, will be started with 75 seats and 100 employees. Fifty of the employees have already been recruited, while the rest are in the process of being recruited.
“The contact center will replace the current one we have, which is more traditional, giving service only through phone calls,” Daniel Hailu, the Bank’s project management office director told Fortune.
Currently, the Bank uses a toll free line, 951, which only provides services through phone calls. But the new one will enable customers to gain access to any information from the Bank through email, phone, chat, and short messages (SMS).
The Bank is now embarking on the project that is to be contracted from ethio-telecom and the price of the system will be decided after the system is installed, according to Daniel.
ethio-telecom is expanding the number of its seats from 1,000 to 3,000, which is part of the Telecom Expansion Project (TEP) that is taking place in the country through 13 telecom centres in a 1.6 billion-dollar contract awarded to two Chinese telecom companies Huawei and ZTE in August 2013. But ZTE’s refusal to work on the swapping of the old networks, and asking for an additional 150 million dollars for the service led ethio telecom’s board to terminate the framework agreement signed with ZTE on April 2014 and award four of the six lots that ZTE has been working on to Ericsson, which proposed 550 million dollars for the project.
The first intention of the Bank was to buy the system that would enable it to have its own contact center and work independently than buying from ethio telecom but because of the cost that it would have incurred, the Bank decided to take advantage of the expansion by ethio telecom and take the seats from it.
“If the contact center were bought from a foreign vendor, we could have paid from 1.5 million dollars to two million dollars,” Daniel said.
Ethio telecom is working to increase the seats in consideration of interested companies and the need to increase the seat number they have to reach the access of the call center to 80pc.
“The expansion of the contact center we have will enable us collocate other companies in the system, enabling them to use short codes,” Andualem Admassie, CEO of ethio telecom told Fortune.
The call center technology has now transferred to a latest technology called IP-based contact centers (IPCC) and they enable the companies to use the system to transfer different types of data such as videos, pictures or phone calls, according to Andualem.
“The license of the call center needs to be upgraded and the licensing is also made whenever new seats are added,” Andualem supplemented. ethio- telecom has a call center that works through 994 and 980 for every customers and corporate customers respectively. Now ethio telecom is working with Ethiopian Electric Power in addition to CBE.
The workers at CBE’s contact center will be working in three shifts for 24 hours and the whole work is expected to be completed within three months, according to Daniel. And when fully operational, it will be able to serve 2,000 to 3,000 customers a day answering 80pc to 90pc of questions on the spot.
The major questions that the customers ask are related to Automated Teller Machines (ATM) use, loan getting process, and account related questions like saving for housing.
The questions that each customer asks and the reply given by the agents will be recorded in the system and the team leaders will check the courtesy and correctness of the replies they provide. Then they will all take trainings every 15 days to upgrade their status, according to Daniel.
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