Global Education Company Transforms Using Amazon Connect

A global education company with over 140 million customers worldwide was attempting to support its customers with outdated contact centre technology. This technology was holding them back, limiting the customer support service, and preventing them from contacting customers with new products and services.

The existing contact centre had all the hallmarks of a legacy platform; slow to adjust to technology developments, and locked into a vendor roadmap that the business relied upon to meet their requirements. The commercial model tied the company into a multi-million, multi-year agreement that wasn’t based on consumption but on a rigid, agent-based model that couldn't flex up and down with customer demand.

The organisation went to market to find a commercial model that retained flexibility, better suited their usage, and provided a platform to meet their immediate and long-term business requirements. For this, they looked for a cloud-based consumption model, with global scale and significant investment in AI and machine learning – an imposing set of requirements.

They found the solution with Amazon Connect. Amazon Connect could easily make and receive over 80 million calls a year, supporting at peak times more than 6,000 geographically dispersed agents, each dealing with multiple lines of business.

How They Did It

A business case was put forward to transform the company’s telephony-focused contact centre into a new cloud platform with multiple inbound and outbound channels leveraging the latest web technologies, whilst ensuring telephony was retained as an option for those still wishing to use it.

The migration required a rapid pace, and 50% of all agents moved to the new Amazon Connect platform within six months of project initiation. An Agile 'build first' approach was chosen, utilising automated tooling; as an example, all existing call flows were captured from the legacy platform and transposed into Amazon Connect contact flows, without human intervention. Initiatives such as this saved hundreds of hours of engineering time and accelerated progress significantly.

Agents and supervisors adapted to the new solution quickly, with Amazon Connect’s intuitive technology and the smooth integration of Salesforce resulting in uninterrupted service, with a familiar interface. The education company achieved 100% adoption across two business units in four months.

The Value of Amazon Connect and Amazon Web Services

A team of internal and external resources was created to deliver the project, with a desire for existing staff to be upskilled and blended into the project team. Not only did this reduce the project's overall cost, but it also ensured that current staff would be ready to take the engineering lead during transition.

The company now has a fully global platform integrated with Salesforce, where agents can make and receive messages across web and telephony technology. This has enabled the company to integrate all contact mediums with its customer data platform, and to rationalise its agent workforce for maximum productivity.

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