Wells Fargo Becomes First Financial Institution to Provide High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service Through Web Collaboration on Its Web Site

Business Wire, Feb 20, 2003

Business Editors

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 20, 2003

Best Selling Author Features Wells Fargo and Lands' End Web

Collaboration in New Book on Bricks-and-Clicks Customer Service

Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) today announced it is the only U.S. financial institution to have Web collaboration available to consumers on its Web site. Wells Fargo synthesizes the bank's online customer service and telephony infrastructure by enabling online customers and service agents to view the same screen from different locations, while simultaneously talking on the phone.

"Providing Web collaboration adds a high-touch component to online banking and bill pay by assuring customers immediate, interactive assistance," said John Stumpf, group executive vice president of Wells Fargo. "Wells Fargo has trained several hundred customer service agents to simultaneously use the phone and Internet to service customers. By seeing what's on the customer's screen, these agents are better able to quickly and accurately address a customer's questions."

"Web collaboration is the embodiment of the next stage of customer service, which focuses on the seamless integration of online and offline services," said Robert Spector, the customer service expert and author of a new paperback book Anytime, Anywhere: How The Best Bricks-and-Clicks Businesses Deliver Seamless Service To Their Customers. "I featured Wells Fargo and Lands' End in my book as companies that are combining the best of both physical and virtual worlds to increase market share. These companies are using innovative, new tools such as Web collaboration to provide an optimal customer experience."

"Wells Fargo and Lands' End share 'the customer first' philosophy," said Bill Bass, senior vice president of Lands' End e-commerce. "Like Wells Fargo, we are committed to providing our customers with the most personal and responsive customer service experience available anywhere."

Wells Fargo's Web collaboration service is state-of-the-art in that it allows a service agent to move a cursor on the customer's screen, for example to help the customer set up online bill pay. First, customers click on the "Live Help" button located on Wells Fargo's Personal Finance page and enter their name and phone number. Within seconds the customer receives a phone call from an agent and the customer and agent can simultaneously view the same Web pages. The service is also available to business customers through Wells Fargo's Commercial Electronic Office, a first to market online portal providing a single point-of-entry for all commercial banking services.

Customers use Wells Fargo's Web collaboration to:

-- Save Time: Before web collaboration, customers had to rely on the agent's ability to visualize the online session/issues they were experiencing. Conversely, the agent was faced with the challenge of conveying an action to the customer without the ability to illustrate that action directly. That is, agents had to verbalize what to do -- or what not to do -- in the future to prevent a problem.

-- Access the Latest Information Immediately: With the shared screen session, customers can see directly what they need to do or what they were doing wrong and as important, Wells Fargo learns first-hand how users navigate through the product application. This knowledge helps us continually enhance the product application to better meet the customer's needs in the future.

-- View Everything At-A-Glance: Customers and bank employees both get a quick, comprehensive display of account balances in real-time.

About Wells Fargo & Company

Wells Fargo & Company is a diversified financial services company with $349 billion in assets, providing banking, insurance, investments, mortgage and consumer finance from more than 5,600 stores and the Internet (www.wellsfargo.com) across North America and elsewhere internationally.