Scalable omnichannel managed services support using Amazon Connect
PwC's Execution Managed Services supports a range of UK and global business clients, bringing together our professional expertise with the right blend of people, technology and process excellence to solve complex business operations challenges and deliver key services at scale. It uses Amazon Connect as a key technology asset to quickly and cost-effectively provide contact centre services for customers.
The challenge: offering flexibility for client customers with digital contact channels
PwC identified a gap in the richness of channel functionality it was providing to clients as part of its managed services offering. We needed to be able to better support our customers with a digitally enabled contact centre platform agnostic of industry sector and geography.
Our clients are increasingly asking for a range of digital channels to satisfy the needs of their customers to engage in different ways in addition to the traditional voice-only communication. These include options such as text chat messaging, WhatsApp and live chatbots to avoid the need to speak to a person to resolve issues. We also found that our clients’ customers want more flexibility so they could connect to services on a 24/7 basis and use the latest conversational AI techniques.
Customers typically use PwC to help support various business needs, including handling regulatory requirements, tackling financial crime, managing Know your Customer (KYC) standards and helping to meet compliance requirements. By offering a cutting-edge contact centre service, our clients would be able to meet their needs in a timely manner as well as improve customer service.
“Today’s customers want to engage in digital ways, such as chatting through WhatsApp rather than over the phone. They also want connectivity at any time. The Operate team is using Amazon Connect to make sure our offerings reflect current trends and increase our confidence that we can prepare for whatever comes next.”
The approach: working with AWS to deliver customised contact centre solutions
We chose to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and deploy Amazon Connect, a cloud-based contact centre solution, to help clients resolve business service challenges cost-effectively. Along with the power of the AWS brand, Amazon Connect offers a rich and diverse feature set that can be customised for each client, meaning we could easily configure a personalised solution for each one based on their individual needs and preferences.
Because Amazon Connect also underpins Amazon's own global operations, it is designed for rapid deployment, change and scale. This was ideal to meet the needs of different clients that might have either a very large or more limited customer base. In addition, some clients required a contact centre service for only a short period of time, such as a bank having a one-off, short-term remediation need, or a software company wanting a more extended contact centre service for several years’ duration. The flexibility of Amazon Connect is the enabler that helps PwC help their clients whatever the scenario.
PwC worked closely with AWS to establish an Amazon Connect capability, and benefitted from AWS-led training sessions and expertise to embed learning in the team and adopt the right technologies, service and skills to help PwC better fulfil their clients’ customer service needs.
We have also integrated Amazon Connect with our digital process transformation platform, combining convergent capabilities such as workflow, reporting and process mining. This gives us a richness of technology tooling to deliver a diverse mix of managed services consistently and at scale across global organisations.
“Our journey so far with Amazon Connect has absolutely convinced us that we're using the right product. Because of this, we're making an investment in building up our artificial intelligence capability and creating a multiyear roadmap for the product.”
The impact: creating cost and time efficiencies for client customers
PwC can now rapidly deploy new contact centre services for clients and provide a richer experience for their customers with a wider range of digital communication channels. With chat support used to answer multiple general enquiries, fewer person-to-person interactions are required, which helps provide support on a 24/7 basis with fewer people. In addition, we are also able to fine tune contact centre costs due to Connect’s consumption based pricing model.
Using Amazon Connect is helping improve responsiveness for PwC client customers and drive efficiencies. For example, the real-time automatic call transcription capability of Amazon Connect can save agents 3-5 minutes on each call over manual transcriptions. Cumulatively, this can mean considerable time savings when handling hundreds of calls during the course of an 8-hour shift. Efficiencies like this free up agents to spend more time and energy directly supportingcustomers. Alternatively, clients can right-size employee numbers in their contact centres to optimise costs.
PwC has also been able to take advantage of the compliance feature in Amazon Connect to deliver new services to clients, opening up new market opportunities. For example, we were able to add Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance, so the contact centre was able to accept card payment information over the phone.
The insight into how we improve customer service is now much more data-led using features such as sentiment analysis to measure and provide feedback on the customer experience during a call. This means that agents can receive alerts in real time should they need to change their customer communication approach and thereby facilitate a more productive conversation.
We are deepening our relationship with AWS to explore the development of new offerings that we can deliver to clients using the available array of AWS services. These include machine-learning-based fraud risk detections and improved connectivity linking KYC data sources to natural language processing.
We are also committing to a multi-year roadmap that makes the most of the capabilities of Amazon Connect and we are also identifying the skills we need to support that. The AWS system has helped us create a dynamic contact centre solution and given us the confidence that we can continually improve the services we offer to clients and to their customers.
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