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Executive Summary
In 2021, Sopra Steria completed a project to migrate the SSCL Government Contact Centre from AVAYA to Amazon Connect.
This contact centre comprised 165 phone lines and manned by 260 staff and 9 Livechat services. Receiving circa 5400 calls and 325 chat requests per day, primarily on the subject of HR, Finance and resourcing queries.
A total of three Amazon Connect instances were commissioned; a dev instance, a pre-prod instance and production instance. These instances were integrated with various services outside of the standard Amazon Connect out of the box solution, including linking with lambda, DynamoDB and PinPoint, for holiday and emergency messaging functionalities, and lambda and API Gateway for the Livechat widget enablement. Furthermore, SAML 2.0 Authentication was setup for each instance and finally, Amazon Connect has been fully integrated into SSCL’s NICE work force management tooling suite .
The aim of the move was for Amazon Connect is to expand on the functionality that the client currently has with their outdated AVAYA solution. Following the completion of the initial migration, the client now hopes to further integrate chatbots, expand their Livechat messaging services, integrate automated call back solutions, introduce Contact lens, Athena (for reporting purposes) and other capabilities to form a fully functional omnichannel solution, all in the aim to facilitate a migration to chat from standard telephony. The client is also planning a large-scale integration of their Amazon Connect instance with Pega to leverage better customer relationship management within their contact centre.
Challenges
The historical AVAYA Telephony and Live Chat solution was insufficient to support a full Omnichannel solution. The proposed solution was to replace AVAYA with AWS Connect telephony; replace 8x8 Live Chat access from myHub with the AWS Live Chat offering and include the AWS API Gateway service as an interim, in the absence of the strategic API Management Platform.
This Solution had to be implemented without any degradation to the Contact Centre Service, following a principle of ‘like for like’ replacement while enabling SSCL to be self-sufficient in their Contact Centre management.
The solution had to Integrate with the existing SSCL Services (e.g., Workforce Management – NICE) and align with the SSCL/Government Standards. This would have allowed the telephony to be Security, GDPR, PCI and Accessibility compliant. Implementing AWS enabled the delivery of future benefits, forecast cost savings, and support the roadmap to the intelligent ecosystem and Omnichannel capability. This was the proposed approach that gained SSCL CTO approval in late 2020 leading to the initiation of the Connect+ project in early 2021.
Note: Although services to build chat bots, voice, custom integrations with workflow, AI (Artificial Intelligence) NLP (Natural Language Processing) etc. were NOT included in the scope of this solution, thought and consideration was applied throughout the evolutionary development cycle, to ensure this programme of work provides the platform to meet the future needs of the SSCL business.
Vision
- Modern contact centre tooling, capable of meeting contractual requirements, client expectations and delivering great customer experience throughout the service.
- Significant increase in SSCL’s capability to scale contact centre services, doing more with less.
- Develop contact centre platform capable of competing with other contact centre service providers in the market.
- Integrate CEX activities throughout journey, underpinned by micro services delivered at point of need.
- Build a secure, world class Contact Centre Platform that enables integrated customer experience, efficiency, and scalability, and must seamlessly integrate into the wider Intelligent Ecosystem.
- Develop a contact centre platform capable of competing with other contact centre service providers in the market.
Benefits
- Rectification of Security and GDPR risk
- Allows End to End integration from myHub to Pega within CCS
- Modern, capable of supporting AI, NLP and voice recognition
- Meets client, customer, and contract expectations
- Highly customisable deployment
- Costs based on usage, rather than annual renewals
- Unlocks ability to sell “contact centre as a service”
- Greatly improved contact analytics including:
- End to end customer and process journey understanding
- Voice analytics opportunity
- Real time trend and customer behaviour analysis
- Ability to report per contract requirements across all contact channels and service requests
- Foundation for end-to-end automation of customer requests
- Allows significant exploitation of SSCL Service + investment beyond base business case
- Voice automation allowing automated ID&V, intent, and contact routing
- Reduced cost of service
- Improved customer experience
- Provides an Omnichannel solution, bringing together voice, email, chat, chat bots and service requests into a single view of a customer, inside of a SSCL Service + agent desktop
- Tight integration across all channels, ensuring end users can ask once and receive consistent responses, regardless of channel or context