Enhanced Software Products Inc., a 13-year-old Spokane Valley developer of software for credit unions, says it plans to open a call center here that would handle, on behalf of the credit unions it serves, customer-service calls from their consumers.

Meanwhile, the company also hopes to launch later this year a remote-banking product for mobile phones, and also has been adding technologies designed to work with its core product, a software package called Forza3 that credit unions use to run their entire operations.

Enhanced Software currently serves about 38 credit unions, scattered around the U.S. and in the Caribbean. It employs 28 people at its Spokane Valley offices, which occupy an 8,600-square-foot building at 1811 N. Hutchinson, near the Argonne Road interchange of Interstate 90.

Company Vice President Matt Lefler says the idea behind the planned call center is that since Enhanced Software already has systems in place that store member account data for its credit-union customers, the company could take on, for its customers, the task of handling routine consumer inquiries over the phone. In other words, a consumer might call his or her credit union with a question, and the call would route directly to the call center here, where an Enhanced Software employee would answer the phone using the credit union's name, then help the consumer by accessing his or her credit union records to provide an answer.

Lefler says the company plans to launch a beta test of the service this fall, handling inbound customer calls for All City Credit Union, of Everett, Wash. To prepare for the launch, Enhanced Software recently upgraded its phone system, and Lefler says it expects to hire two to four employees to help handle the call volume. He says Enhanced Software already staffs its office 24 hours a day to handle its own customer-service calls.

"It's really an extension of the phone center we already have," he says. "We have customers in all four U.S. time zones, so this makes sense for us," Lefler says.

Initially, the company will handle calls for such routine tasks as checking account balances, initiating fund transfers, requesting blank checks, and providing hours of operation, but later could offer more involved processes such as taking loan applications over the phone, he says.

"We plan to offer this service to all of our customers," he says, adding that if the company signs up half of its customer base for the call-center service, it will need to hire an additional five to 10 employees for the center.

As for the remote banking application, the company is developing software that would allow credit union members to use their smart phones to access their accounts to perform routine banking tasks. The offerings likely will include both Web-based systems that would sense when a user is accessing a credit union customer's remote banking site and instantly tailor the Web page to fit that particular phone's screen, and stand-alone applications such as those used on iPhones and Blackberry devices, Lefler says.

He says the company hopes to release the software later this year, and that it will be offered as an "add-on" to the suite of software products it offers. It already offers a Web-based home-banking product called Oasis to the credit unions it serves.

Lefler says Enhanced Software has launched other new technology in recent months, including a way for credit unions to create and store "paperless" transaction receipts, using an LCD screen that shows a receipt-like image for a customer to sign using an electronic wand. A credit union saves such signed images for its records and prints out a receipt for the customer if asked.

That technology is among a host of "paperless" enhancements the company has made that Lefler asserts will save credit unions money on storage costs and give them a layer of redundancy in case of disaster, since all the images—and for that matter all account data—are stored remotely and backed up by the Spokane Valley company on behalf of its customers.

Another similar technology is the ability to scan any customer document—ranging from a property title to a driver's license—and attach the image electronically to the customer's account file, for secure storage and easy retrieval. Enhanced Software also offers a way for credit unions to issue paperless statements to their customers, he says.

Those and other services—including a printing and mailing service for conventional printed statements—are sold as add-ons to the company's Forza3 product, which handles a wide variety of teller and back-office functions for credit unions. That software has a component that is installed on individual computers at a credit union, but relies on processing power inside Enhanced Software's servers, which communicate with credit union locations using a secure, high-speed Internet connection, Lefler says.

The company's charges vary by the size of a credit union and the services the credit union might require, but Lefler says a hypothetical example would be that a credit union with 5,000 members might pay about 80 cents per member per month, or $4,000, to use Enhanced Software's software suite.

Lefler declines to disclose the company's revenue or profit figures, but says sales have been somewhat flat in the past year or so, as the company has concentrated on migrating to its Forza3 software its customers who still are using its Shared Vision 2000 product.

"We're being very aggressive about moving our customers out of that legacy product," he says.

He says he hopes the company is able to add three to four new credit unions as customers next year.

The company, which has no customers in the Spokane area, competes with a range of companies, from credit union service organizations to big financial-services companies.

The company is owned by Kathy Murray, who also is its president and CEO.