EVI setting up call centers for credit card industry

NEW DELHI: Equfax Venture Infotek, (EVI), an e-infrastructure company for the

credit card industry, will set up call centers for the industry. In the first

phase, EVI will set up centers in eight locations and will provide services to

all its partner banks. The first initiative of its kind in India, the call

center will initially service over 14 banks in the country. In the second phase,

scheduled for 2001, the centers will be Web enabled and provide multimedia

content, thereby enabling customer interaction through voice, fax, e-mail,

walk-in and co-browsing customers.

The call center will benefit banks, merchants, establishments and

cardholders. Banks will benefit by faster transaction processing, more loyal

customers and better technology. On the cardholder side, the benefits are 24x7

service and convenient transactions for customers. The call center will help in

minimizing risk to the merchant establishments when accepting credit card

payments by verifying cardholder balances online.

The company plans to invest Rs 300 lakh in implementing the technology over

the next 60 days. Servion has been selected as the systems integrator and the

software for the project will be developed by EVI. The call centers will be

operational within 90 days and will use Lucent’s Definiti G3si switch.

The architecture will connect eight call centers all over the country to a

central database in Mumbai. This means that all updated customer information is

available at a single point and then disseminated to the call center where the

customer logs in.