Empowering complex contact-center transformations with Amazon Connect

The pandemic has made a broad range of activities remote, including work, meetings, shopping, and operations. But while we are apart, it has never been more important for companies to stay engaged with their customers, employees, and partners. Organizations need to ask themselves how to increase engagement while improving customer satisfaction in an agile, cost-effective, and efficient way. It is a complex problem to solve.

An end-to-end contact-center transformation enabled by the cloud can be the solution. Making sure your contact center operates smoothly and efficiently not only helps you create better relationships with your customers but can also reduce costs while having the flexibility to grow and expand when needed. Capgemini can help your call center transform from merely functional to being the best it can be.

Capgemini’s expertise and our partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Amazon Connect has helped companies accomplish comprehensive Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solution transformations efficiently and effectively.

Successful contact-center transformations aim to improve on the following areas.

1. Scalability and resiliency: Contact-centre solutions need to be able to quickly scale up to handle massive, sudden, and significant surges in call volumes due to unexpected disruptions such as COVID or local events such as power outages or shutdowns triggered by extreme weather events. Legacy IVR solutions suffer from a per-seat licensing model and cannot handle unexpected surges. Companies need IVR solutions capable of scaling both up and down in terms of performance and pricing. Additionally, the solutions must offer resilience when faced with sharp increases in call volumes.
2. Containment and self-service: Companies want to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology advancements to enhance customer satisfaction and improve self-service capabilities. This empowers customers to have common questions resolved more quickly via a virtual agent, saving time for a call-centre employee to handle specialized customer queries. The goal is to increase containment rates – calls completely handled by IVR – to above 80 per cent.
3. Cost per interaction: Improving containment rates is one way to reduce costs, and the other is having a larger number of channels for interactions, such as web chat, mobile chat, SMS, social-media chat, and others. Adding chat-based channels allows for asynchronous communications and enables agents to multi-task and handle more customers simultaneously, compared to a traditional phone-call mechanism. This has a significant impact on reducing average costs per customer interaction. And it is an opportunity to serve customers in their communication channel of preference.
4. Customer satisfaction: Building a solid brand requires constant customer engagement. As customer needs change, contact-centre solutions should adapt as well. The solution should be agile, adaptable, and extensible to ensure the highest customer satisfaction levels without unexpected costs. Modern IVR applications should provide the ability to collect customer feedback immediately after the call experience.
5. Workforce efficiency: The most significant portion of call-centre run costs are related to human resources, so it is vital to leverage this resource efficiently. A modern solution must support workforce management and include predictive capabilities that allow for the most effective use of contact-centre personnel. Since most of the resources are remote and distributed geographically, IVR solutions must be intuitive and highly agent friendly to facilitate easy onboarding with minimal setup costs.
6. Advanced analytics and reporting: Metrics such as average wait times, call duration, conversion rates, agent productivity, customer ratings, call counts, chat counts, and more are essential for tracking success. Comprehensive IVR solutions need to provide these reports out-of-the-box with intuitive dashboards to inform managers on trends while enabling them to remediate, adapt, and thrive. This information can be used to predict capacity requirements and further optimize service levels.
7. Elastic licensing: Contact centres will continue to experience surges in call volumes due to known, unknown, and unknowable circumstances. IVR solutions must provide elastic and usage-based licensing models, rather than traditional per-seat models which lock enterprises into a fixed capacity, pre-paid capital-expense model. Companies must seek usage-based pay-as-you-go pricing as they transform their call-centre capabilities.

Answering the call

A European national telehealth and telecare organization engaged Capgemini to alleviate the strain on its existing contact center caused when call volumes increased by 300 percent (12,000 calls per day) during the early weeks of the pandemic. Amazon Connect was selected to filter out “worried well” calls to provide self-care guidance and an assessment of criticality, utilizing the call flow and automated voice system. Capgemini manages this service for the client, including 24×7 support, and standard service level agreements (SLAs) where requests of the highest severity can be supported within two hours. As a result, the client has experienced reduction in call volumes of 30 to 40 percent (3,000 to 4,000 calls per day). The automated voice capability has enabled increased flexibility and agility to respond to regularly required updates and changes. An additional benefit of this cloud-based service allows the client to scale the solution as needed with no additional impact to infrastructure. For this engagement, Capgemini was awarded Most Customer Obsessed Mission Based Win from AWS.

Capgemini has significant experience designing and implementing contact-center modernizations in various government and industry clients using Amazon Connect, a highly scalable and resilient cloud-based solution for contact centers. We have developed multiple accelerators for the Amazon Connect solution to complete large-scale call-center transformations exceptionally rapidly and efficiently. Our comprehensive contact-center reference architecture and its partnerships with global complementary third-party specialist solutions provide industry-leading capabilities to meet complex and varied customer requirements. Capgemini’s reference solution, comprised of the reference architecture and the accelerators, incorporates all solution dimensions while ensuring flexibility and extensibility.

We are a leading global provider of technology consulting services that assists companies to accelerate their digital transformations and helps clients get the future they want. Specific to cloud-based contact-center transformations, Capgemini specializes in domain and technology expertise that clients can leverage to equip themselves quickly to operate in a world that is evolving and reacting, quickly and effectively.

Ravikanth Ganta

Expert in AWS, Cloud migrations, Cloud strategy, Digital Transformation

I leverage 18+ years of full-life cycle software project engagements and deep technical expertise in cloud and on-premise solutions in the Life Sciences, Media, QSR, and Government sectors in order to liaise, lead, and influence clients, partners, and technologists on successful approaches for globe-scale digital transformations with efficiency and exponential yields.
I have co-founded / advised / led 4+ B2B and B2C technology startups, and I help Fortune 500 clients think, act, and react as lean startups, without loss of scale, reliability, and security.