Nick Walton (AWS)
Energy and telecommunications provider Trustpower has migrated its contact centre to Amazon Web Services (AWS), claiming to be the first local "multi-services" provider to adopt Amazon Connect.
Trustpower is New Zealand’s fourth largest fixed-line telecommunications retailer and is New Zealand’s fifth largest electricity generator and energy retailer.
The omnichannel cloud contact centre would support the evolving complexity of customer interactions in Trustpower’s growing multi-services business, the company said.
The news comes, however, a fortnight after Tauranga-based Trustpower announced it was launching a strategic review over the potential sale of its retail electricity, gas and telecommunications businesses.
More than 230,000 customers use Trustpower for electricity, gas, and telecommunications services, with the company’s contact centre agents receiving more than 70,000 customer enquiries each month.
The COVID-19 lockdown in March last year added a new layer of complexity to that with the need for flexible working arrangements for agents becoming quickly evident.
After only 10 days of internal platform development, Trustpower migrated more than 200 contact centre agents from its on-premises, voice-based contact centre system to Amazon Connect, enabling them to work from home.
Within three months, the company successfully completed the migration of its entire contact centre environment to AWS with no downtime during migration.
“We started researching contact centre solutions late in 2019 but were driven to move rapidly due to the COVID-19 lockdown in March last year," said Matt van Deventer, general manager, technology and delivery at Trustpower.
"With the looming lockdown, the primary requirement was for us to enable our staff to work from home while delivering quality customer experience."
Amazon Connect provided a better experience for agents to service customers in a faster and more user-friendly way.
“Other benefits include a simplified contact centre environment, rapid prototyping, and fast deployment to scale services quickly," van Deventer said.
"Using Amazon Connect, we will apply data analytics and artificial intelligence to customer data to predict the ‘next best action’, such as recommending the next step in resolving a customer enquiry or introducing new services, to provide an enhanced customer experience."
Nick Walton, New Zealand managing director for commercial sector at AWS, said by choosing Amazon Connect for their contact centre technology, Trustpower now had a scalable, cost-effective, and secure contact centre solution that could adjust to the changing needs of their customers in real-time and give them the ability to easily and naturally engage with their customers.
