OREANDA-NEWS. January 25, 2012. Zhao Wei has a special first day of the New Year 2012. As a customer representative of ICBC Electronic Banking Center, Zhao Wei worked as usual during the New Year holiday. She answered customers calling 95588 across the country with passion, helping them complete the formalities of their financial transactions during the holiday. Zhao Wei said: "Although I cannot spend the holiday with my family, I am happy when customers say thank you to me on the phone!", reported the press-centre of ICBC.

Like Zhao Wei, 1658 ICBC Telephone Banking call desk staff were on duty during the New Year holiday just passed, attending over 500,000 incoming calls from customers. With an answering rate of 95% or above and 90% calls answered within 20 seconds, ICBC call desk staff sent the New Year blessing to all the customers through their top-quality, highly efficient financial services.

Over the last few years, ICBC has stepped up electronic banking services as one important measure to improve services and customer experience, paying particular attention on service capacity and service quality, an executive with ICBC said. The Bank assigns more call desk staff in order to shorten the waiting time of the customers. By end-2011, ICBC Telephone Banking has 4000+ call desk staff to attend the incoming calls. Today, ICBC Telephone Banking receives nearly 200,000 calls every day with an answering rate of over 95%, a high standard among the peers. To enhance the quality of service, ICBC sets up the fast-listening and monitoring call mechanism. Customer representatives are trained through comparison learning to ensure the service quality. Referencing the data statistics, ICBC uses sophisticated operation analysis to scale up service quality by highly efficient, reasonable operation management. The customers warmly welcome the good services of ICBC Telephone Banking.

While focusing consistently on the improvement of telephone banking services, ICBC was the first bank in China to roll out SMS banking services in July 2010. To customers, just edit the question into a SMS and send to 95588, SMS Banking will send back an accurate reply immediately. At the end of 2011, ICBC SMS Banking has attracted more than 2.7 million users, over 7.15 million SMS reply have been sent. On average, customers only wait for 1 minute for the reply. Besides, ICBC does not collect any fee on SMS customer service, except the SMS fee collected by telecom operators.

This helps customers reduce the cost of enquiry. ICBC leverages its strong technology to achieve a breakthrough, providing service from answering simple enquiry to complex business advisory. Through supplement and update of massive data, ICBC SMS Banking has built a SMS database covering nearly 40,000 Q&A on all ICBC services. Q&A in the templates is arranged in logical order, very straight-forward down to each forward, comprehensive and simple, which is warmly received by all customers.