Always of interest — to me and to No Jitter readers — are deployment stories told by customers. As AWS continues to grow its global customer base, I thought it would be interesting to highlight one North American-based and one customer from the UK/EMEA region about their reasons for choosing Amazon Connect.
Manulife Canada
Colwell began by saying that Manulife Canada is on a journey to modernize its contact center, and using Amazon Connect is a particularly important enabler of that. He explained that Manulife Canada has several contact centers across Canada. Colwell and Mitchell primarily discussed the group’s disability case management and group benefits contact center, which receives 3.9 million calls annually, with a staff of approximately 2,200 agents, case managers, teams of support, and other leaders. The centers serve customers in both English and French.
Colwell shared that Manulife Canada has seen these benefits:
- Because Amazon Connect is a cloud-based platform, Manulife Canada will no longer need to manage an on-prem infrastructure.
- Amazon Connect can scale to a company’s needs and has all the capabilities Manulife needs to support what they do.
- AWS has a wider portfolio. Amazon Connect is just one of many services provided by the AWS cloud. Customers can easily integrate the contact center with other AWS services they may already use or find valuable, eg, a database or an analytics solution. Manulife uses a range of services from AWS; using a single vendor to provide core capabilities removes a lot of complexity.
Mitchell noted that Manulife Canada felt “very fortunate” that colleagues at John Hancock in the United States started their Amazon Connect journey several years before them. Manulife Canada met with John Hancock’s colleagues and had an in-depth discussion about what they had implemented.
Manulife Canada was pleased with the results of the Amazon Connect minimally viable product (MVP) deployment. Colwell reports that it took just 12 weeks for each of the deployments, from the time the team started development to the launch of the solution. One of the many benefits Manulife highlighted in the Contact Center Days session was the ability to support multiple languages in the same call flow – which cut in half the number of flows they had to build.
The graphic below shows the benefits Manulife saw in its first four weeks of production on Amazon Connect. Colwell specifically called for reducing the transferred call rate by ten percent – affecting both caller and agent effort. At the end of the session, Colwell said that future plans with Amazon Connect include deployment in additional lines of business and deployment of self-service.
Vodafone Business Services
Vodafone has many business and contact centers around the world. Ampofo explained that his experience with Amazon Connect began with a request for proposal in January 2021 for Vodafone Business Services’ contact center, which supports customer care for business clients with approximately 400 agents.
Vodafone Business Services uses what can best be described as a first generation CCaaS solution. Ampofo describes the legacy solution as “telephony,” essentially a voice-only call center application delivered from private data centers, not a public cloud. The goal of the move is to improve the agent experience, improve the customer experience, and better align with the company’s long-term technology strategy.
As is often true of modern cloud migrations, Ampofo described an Amazon Connect demo as crucial to getting permission to proceed with the migration. He explained that Vodafone chose ServiceNow as its primary IT service management software. During the demo — working with implementation partner Accenture — AWS showed Vodafone Business Services management an integration with ServiceNow, with a Vodafone “skin,” i.e., user interface. A single pane of glass between ServiceNow and the contact center application was not possible with the previous solution and is part of Amazon Connect that delivers a better agent and customer experience.
The previous case studies show different paths for migrating to modern public cloud-based contact center solutions like Amazon Connect are available. One path is from on-premises contact center solutions; the other is from first-generation cloud deployments.