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Transport for London (TfL) operates the UK capital’s public transport network and main roads. Among its responsibilities, TfL oversees an accreditation scheme which manages the safe and sustainable operation of more than 107,000 commercial vehicles through the Fleet Operators Recognition System (FORS). TfL has selected Sopra Steria to operate the scheme. As part of this programme, TfL has decided to improve its customer journey and experience thanks to a modern Cloud-based and omnichannel contact centre based on Amazon and AWS Technologies.
A better customer experience for fleet operators across the UK and Europe
TfL is the integrated transport authority responsible for running the day-to-day operation of London’s public transport network and manage its main roads. Created by TfL, the FORS is an accreditation scheme which encourages and incentivises the
safe and sustainable operation of more than 107,000 commercial vehicles in UK and Europe. FORS commits fleet operators to progressively achieve managerial, vehicle and driving standards relating to road safety, legal compliance, and environmental
performance. In 2021, to reinforce its customer journey and experience, FORS has decided to modernise its contact centre handling more than 45,000 interactions a year. Its previous telephony solution was rigid, with minimal room for
improving functionality to enable future ways of working. Operating the FORS platform, Sopra Steria Digital and Cloud Center of Excellence Teams explored how to replace the contact centre telephony solution, with Amazon Connect.
Modernising a contact centre in less than 7 months
The idea of implementing Amazon Connect using the dedicated Amazon Connect development team was first evaluated by Sopra Steria Digital and Cloud Center of Excellence, combining Interaction Consulting teams and Amazon and AWS technologies specialists.
In 2022, these multi-competence teams launched a 3-month assessment to better understand FORS’ initial requirements: increasing customer satisfaction, benefiting from new automation features to manage the service more efficiently and reducing
operational costs.
This interactive consultative period focused on prioritising and improving customer journey and experience, was then followed by a data collection phase, which lead to the creation of an MVP and a pre-production environment.
The Sopra Steria Digital and Cloud Center of Excellence Teams then built a new omnichannel contact centre, including both voice and chat with conversational AI. The solution is based on Amazon Connect including Contact Lens, Amazon Lex, AWS Lambda and AWS IAM.
After a handover with the incumbent solution, the new platform allows the FORS Team and clients to start 2023 by leveraging a brand-new Cloud-based contact centre, supporting AI, NLP and voice recognition.
An omnichannel contact centre, enhancing customer satisfaction and agent efficiency
The FORS contact centre team members must be able to field all callers’ potential queries. As such, the Amazon Connect solution needed to allow callers to quickly navigate the telephony menus and allow agents to better identify and track calls to
allow them to improve their efficiency. Sopra Steria Teams developed a bot via Amazon Lex that asked the caller to explain the object of their call before then, using intents, match that response with a set of pre-determined subjects. The solution
also allows the reporting of the call matter to easily be tracked within Amazon Connect. As well as incoming contacts, the team also needed follow-up on queries and opportunities to better serve a wider number of their clients. The outbound solution
needed to be simple to operate and monitor while also more importantly, providing visibility to all agents to let them know that dialling out at that moment would not cause added strain. Sopra Steria Teams saw an opportunity within Amazon Connect
to partly automate this cause and effect, by implementing an automated call-back service that would only operate when availability across the centre allowed.
“FORS aims to drive up standards. Thanks to this Cloud-based omnichannel contact centre, we offer a better customer experience to our thousands of customers and a more productive platform to our agents. We also take advantage of the high degree
of customisation of the solution, the native scalability of the Cloud and the pay-as-you-go business model. We now look forward to extending our service with an outbound campaign.”
Aimee Mitchell, Head of Business Operations at FORS
Benefits
For FORS customers: | For FORS Contact Centre team: | For FORS’ IT Operations Teams: |
- Increase customer experience through the extension of available first contact channels, including both voice and chat
- Improved end-to-end customer and process journey, including a new “Ask once and receive consistent responses, regardless of channel or context” feature and enhanced call-waiting messages, thanks to the tight integration
across all channels
- Extended service availability now offered 24/7, through scalable Chat with conversational AI
| - Improvement of the end-to-end customer and process journey understanding, thanks to real-time trend and customer behaviour analysis
- Enhancement of efficiency thanks to the ability to report per contract requirements across all contact channels and service requests, and reduction of the manual effort on each contact
- New analytics capabilities for the contact centre management and users, spanning contact analytics and voice analytics
| - Smooth integration of a modern omnichannel contact centre in due time
- Pay-as-you-go business model, allowing to reduce cost to strict usage
- Strong Cloud-based contact centre foundation, including end-to-end automation, AI, NLP and voice recognition components seamlessly connected with AWS technologies
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Key Figures
- 107,000 commercial vehicles
- 4,700 fleet operators
- More than 45,000 interactions a year