Collinson
When fostering brand loyalty and traveler services is your business, your contact center must deliver superior customer support.
In January 2020, after Collinson’s very own Chris Barrow attended a two-day Amazon Connect Bootcamp hosted by VoiceFoundry, he was sure Amazon Connect was the perfect solution to transform Collinson’s contact center from functional to 21st century. Then in March, after learning that they had only two weeks to ready their global contact center for full remote-based operations, Collinson enlisted the services of VoiceFoundry because they possessed the expertise needed to migrate their contact center quickly and smoothly.
About Collinson
A global company, Collinson provides loyalty and traveler services helping companies to attract and retain customers. Its traveler services include the world’s leading airport lounge and experiences program, Priority Pass, as well as travel insurance, identity assistance, flight delay, international health, medical and security assistance and travel medical services.
The Challenge
Collinson’s existing on-premise, legacy Avaya solution was expensive to maintain, limited in capacity and lacked many capabilities to support their growing business needs. Crucially it also lacked the capabilities to support a 100% home-working operation.
With hopes of building a state-of-the-art contact center while also seeking to expand customer reach, increase channels of communication and provide customer service that was personalized and automated, Collinson began evaluating new technologies and Amazon Connect emerged as the solution needed to accomplish their objectives.
After learning they only had two weeks to enable employees to work from home due to COVID-19, Collinson had no time to lose. They needed to rapidly deploy a production-ready solution to avoid customer service interruption.
The Solution
VoiceFoundry delivered Amazon Connect in a single global instance, designing and deploying the solution to support Collinson’s Travel Experiences division. The Amazon Connect platform contained the following key features:
- Simple User Interface: An easy to use front-end user interface to easily control hours of operation (emergency closures and holiday schedules) and manage message prompts.
- Real-time Reporting: The ability to push real-time and historical data for agent and queue metrics to their existing MS-SQL database that resides on their own AWS estate to integrate with current business processes for reporting as well as workforce management and optimization.
- Secure Payment: Secure IVR for processing customer card payments in a fully PCI DSS compliant manner using PayShield solutions.
The Outcome
Within a fortnight, VoiceFoundry was able to design and deploy Amazon Connect at incredible speed. The easy-to-use interface required minimal training enabling hundreds of Collinson’s contact center staff in Cape Town, Dallas and Hong Kong to accept calls on Amazon Connect from the safety of their homes using only a laptop, headset and home-based internet connection.
As the number of incoming calls began to slow due to travel restrictions, Collinson utilized the downtime to continue enhancing the contact center build. VoiceFoundry continued to configure contact center enhancements such as:
- Preferred-language contact routing profiles
- Security requirement improvements powered by Payshield
- Expansion readiness for future growth into additional markets
- Automated omnichannel capabilities
VoiceFoundry designed Amazon Connect right in front of us and would screen share to implement designs on the fly. This enabled us to visualize how calls would be routed and handled. It is no exaggeration in saying that VoiceFoundry helped to ensure our customer service operation was fit and secure for the new work-from-home directive that was happening in countries around the world.Chris Barrow, Solutions Architect, Collinson
Why VoiceFoundry
Having experienced firsthand the depth of expertise shown by VoiceFoundry at an Amazon Connect bootcamp in London, after conducting a brief RFI, Collinson chose VoiceFoundry to design, implement and deploy Amazon Connect.
VoiceFoundry, the first Amazon Connect Reseller globally, is passionate about customer experience and brings an unparalleled level of knowledge and expertise of contact center technologies, allowing even the most complex projects to move quickly from design to deployment.
We specialize in the delivery of cloud-based enterprise contact center solutions and are distinctly focused on helping businesses develop a strong cloud migration strategy. We are experts at deploying solutions based on the Amazon Web Services portfolio with a special focus on Amazon Connect for contact centers.
Our expertise is focused on AI & natural language automation, CTI, enterprise integration, user experience design, analytics and workforce optimization. With a relentless pursuit of customer success, our team strives to disprove the notion that software projects have to be painful – and that technology must hurt to work.