Imaging delivers call centre efficiency

American Express' call centre for the Asia Pacific region is an example of one system in which enormous efficiencies were achieved through the integration of information management technologies.

Prior to implementing these technologies the system was quite convoluted. All customer correspondence was sent to the region's head office in Sydney by courier, where it was entered into the customer service system. This meant that there was quite a lag from the time a piece of correspondence was received until a call centre agent could access that information.

If a customer rang up to query the state of their transaction, the agent didn't know. But by integrating an imaging system, each branch throughout Asia-Pacific could scan in the correspondence and send it via the wide area network to Sydney, where it was indexed and released into the system, often straight into a workflow system. Lag time was reduced from as much as a week to a few hours.