Transforming Contact Centers with an AI-First Approach with AWS and IBM

Imagine a world where customer issues are resolved effortlessly from the first interaction and reduce customer churn. Today’s customers demand exceptional service and a seamless omnichannel experience, and they expect businesses to recognize their identity, past purchases and desired outcomes across all channels.

While some companies excel in meeting these expectations, others face significant challenges.

Contact center agents operate under vast pressure to find quick customer service solutions—yet they often lack the tools to do so. They navigate multiple screens and programs, with limited knowledge of their clients’ previous interactions, and struggle to address complex customer queries. Further, customer data is dispersed across various systems, making it difficult to access and utilize efficiently.

These mounting pressures can result in high turnover rates, accompanied by the expenses of hiring and training new agents, and lead to a negative customer experience.

The IBM Consulting Contact Center Modernization (CCM) solution with Amazon Connect addresses complex and costly issues faced by businesses, and ultimately enhances customer experience and reduces churn.

In this post, you will learn how IBM Consulting CCM combines Amazon Connect—an intuitive, omnichannel cloud platform—with enriched functionality built by IBM Consulting. By employing the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) throughout the solution, businesses can unlock accelerated time-to-value and gain access to a range of additional features that enhance customer and agent experiences to achieve industry-leading standards.

As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with numerous AWS Competencies and Service Delivery specializations including Amazon Connect, IBM holds a distinguished position in the industry. With IBM Consulting’s extensive expertise and capabilities in contact center transformation, gained through collaborating with clients worldwide, businesses can trust in IBM’s proven track record of success.

How IBM Enriches the Amazon Connect Solution

Contact center managers often face challenges with their infrastructure, such as implementing new features and managing multiple communication channels. This complexity requires extra effort, skills, and costs for daily operations. Upgrading these systems can be expensive, time-consuming, and risky.

IBM Consulting CCM addresses these challenges with an open architecture, leveraging the strengths of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM Consulting’s expertise, while integrating with platforms like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

Offered as a managed service with no initial financial outlay, IBM Consulting CCM can be implemented in less than four months, minimizing upfront costs and business risks. During this time, IBM Consulting gathers necessary information, sets up the environment, configures the contact center, and deploys the solution to production.

Figure 1 – Combining AWS and IBM innovations in one solution, delivered with speed as a managed service.

This streamlined approach ensures an efficient implementation process, empowering contact center managers to optimize their operations, enhance customer experiences, and drive business success. All of this without the typical financial and operational burdens associated with traditional contact center infrastructure upgrades.

IBM Consulting CCM is a comprehensive managed service that enhances the core contact center capabilities of Amazon Connect. It introduces a range of new channels, features, and enhancements to improve and unify the experiences of both customers and agents across all communication channels and diverse use cases.

Here are the key enhancements:

Figure 2 – Reporting and analytics concept.

Accelerating Implementation

IBM Consulting expedites the implementation of the IBM Consulting CCM solution by leveraging automation in the deployment process, resulting in a significantly reduced deployment time of just one or two days. This accelerated implementation is made possible through the utilization of AWS CloudFormation templates, as illustrated in Figure 3 below.

AWS CloudFormation is responsible for deploying all resources, where applicable and implemented by AWS. At the component level, users can specify which components to deploy and the solution can be deployed all at once or in multiple steps using several CloudFormation stacks.

All services developed as a code have AWS CodePipelines merging a pull request deploying to cloud. Additionally, both Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect have CodePipelines configured to facilitate exporting to GitHub and importing to another environment, ensuring seamless integration and deployment workflows.

Figure 3 – Process of automated deployment.

IBM Consulting CCM further expedites implementation by offering a standardized collection of industry-specific business scenarios. These serve as a foundation for pre-training virtual assistants, providing a baseline concierge bot solution capability known as IBM Consulting CCM Cartridges.

Currently, these cartridges are tailored to five industries: banking, utilities, telecommunications, retail, and insurance. Each industry cartridge contains a set of pre-built scenarios that can be customized to customer requirements.

For example, as a banking client you can set a new limit for your credit card, block your credit card, or request a new one—using just chatbot or voicebot. The virtual assistant executes requested actions using an AWS Lambda function to resolve customer requests and sending proper details to the customer enterprise system.

Additionally, next-gen pre-built project accelerators—including a comprehensive project plan, configuration workbook, estimation framework, and other tools—reduce time spent in project definition and expedite the discovery phase with pre-defined questions.

Solution Architecture

IBM Consulting CCM features a modular, loosely-coupled architecture for scalability and flexibility, allowing integration with third-party applications, enabling organizations to leverage existing tools and technologies. It uses role-based access control (RBAC) to minimize security risks and logs all activities for auditing and compliance purposes.

The following descriptions correspond to numbered sections in the solution architecture diagram shown in Figure 4:

Figure 4 – High-level architecture landscape of IBM Consulting CCM.

Benefits

IBM Consulting’s CCM brings a full set of business and technical features to drive significant value. By enabling omnichannel interactions handled by live and virtual agents, available round the clock, and providing personalized insights, IBM Consulting delivers the following outcomes:

IBM Consulting’s unique delivery and commercial approach offer added value by enabling brands to break free from the conventional customer service model and accelerate their customer service transformation with the following benefits:

Figure 5 – Values provided by IBM Consulting’s CCM.

Summary

In this post, you discovered a deeper understanding of how the IBM Consulting Contact Center Modernization (CCM) solution with Amazon Connect can drive your contact center and customer service transformation. By leveraging speed and operational efficiency, and by delivering exceptional customer experiences, IBM Consulting CCM enables brands to jump-start their journey towards success.

With a range of pre-built features that can be customized to align with your organization’s specific requirements, partnering with IBM Consulting empowers you to continually enhance and expand your customer service capabilities. Embrace this transformative solution and unlock the full potential of your contact center operations.

Contact IBM Consulting to learn more about how CCM can revolutionize your contact center operations, improve customer satisfaction, and drive business growth.

By: Simona Bonková and Ján Šalata, Architects – IBM Consulting; Petr Vaculík and Avdyl Haxhaj, Offering Leads – IBM Consulting; Shiva Bayati, Global D&TT GTM Alliance Lead, AWS – IBM Consulting; Phani Lingamallu, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS