OREANDA-NEWS. June 06, 2013. In recent years, ICBC has stepped up telephone banking services as one important measure to improve services, paying particular attention on service capacity and service functions.

As of today, ICBC has over 100 million registered users of 95588 Telephone Banking and 6,000+ call desk staff attending around 400,000 calls every day on average, ranking No.1 among all banks in China.

According to an ICBC official, the Ministry of Information Industry issued a decree on June 30, 1999 to approve ICBC exclusive short hotline "95588", the first telephone number used by non-IT company in China.

With an aim to improve services to customers, ICBC has built an international-standard system to ensure customized delivery of telephone banking services. This has been a result of consistent efforts of the Bank in R&D, system development and service innovation during the last few years. Nowadays, ICBC Telephone Banking uses intelligent interactive voice response (IVR) and 95588 call desk to provide a basket of financial services covering account enquiry, transfer/remittance, wealth management, bill payment, credit card services and call desk answering service.

In October 2012, ICBC launched an intelligent voice recognition Telephone Banking service, the first such service in China using industry-leading voice recognition technology to determine the services needed by the customers automatically, intelligently and accurately. The new service creates a new experience for customers by offering an open, interactive system based on natural language. Further, ongoing efforts have been spent to improve self-services, call desk services, IVR menus/functions. With fewer steps, customers no longer need to call repeatedly. With continuous upgrade and optimization of its telephone banking knowledgebase and quality management, the Bank has succeeded in bringing the standardized and systematic operational management of its electronic banking to a higher level.

While concentrating on the technology and service quality, ICBC also set up Telephone Banking service centers in Beijing, Shijiazhuang, Hefei and Guangzhou serving customers in China and 14 other countries/territories.