Overview
Implementing a new platform with Amazon Connect
Telstra is Australia’s leading telecommunications and technology company, building technology and content solutions that are simple and easy to use, including Australia’s largest and fastest national mobile network.
One pillar of Telstra’s T25 strategy is delivering exceptional customer experience you can count on. As part of this mission, Telstra has reimagined its customer contact experience, designing and implementing a new best-in-class, cloud-native contact platform. Built on Amazon Connect, the platform utilises powerful AI and machine learning capabilities to offer a flexible and personalised approach to customer engagement. Improved customer authentication and proactive query intent ensures customers save substantial effort while getting the support they need faster than ever before.
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0%approx number of customers who choose the self-serve option in the My Telstra app
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0%reduction in the average time to resolve enquiries
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0xfaster to answer and serve customers through the My Telstra app
Challenge
To build a contact centre for tomorrow’s world
As part of Telstra’s ongoing transformation to become a digital-first enterprise, an extensive search was conducted for an advanced customer contact platform to set a new baseline for the future. One that elevates the experience for both customers and employees to make connecting with Telstra faster and more personal than ever before.
“The Telstra contact centre team is now a ‘remote work’ operation, and customer expectations have also shifted quickly. They don’t just want to call us,” says Amy Childs, Contact Centre Executive.
“They want to message us, they want to help themselves, and they want us to know why they’re calling without needing to repeat themselves.”
Existing contact centre systems were not designed for a multi-channel approach. If a customer made first contact via chat and wanted to move to a call, it required re-authentication processes and poor continuity for the customer. Self-service options for customers were also lacking, adding load to the contact centre team for many basic queries and simple solutions.
For Telstra’s customer service agents, existing systems saw customer data held across multiple databases that required VPN access to on-prem platforms and more than one window required to find all relevant information to a customer query. This added to stress and delays for both agents and customers.
As Telstra continues to push toward reinventing itself as a truly digital native company, developing a contact centre platform that offers greater flexibility was becoming a new essential to meet the demands and desires of customers well into the future. It was critical to find the right partner to work with on a new platform that would reduce cost, provide better customer experience, and enhance contact centre capability.
Telstra is also pursuing an ambitious strategy to be AI-fuelled. “We want to embed AI in products, services and the way decisions are made” says Dayle Stevens, Data and AI Executive.
We want to embed AI in products, services and the way decisions are made.
Dayle Stevens
Data and AI Executive, Telstra
Solution
Improved omichannel support services
Telstra declared its new contact centre vision as “bringing customer experience to life, at any time, and on any connected device with Telstra’s reliability and security at its core.” Amazon Connect was selected as the ideal solution to drive continuous, data-driven transformation for its contact centre needs.
AWS worked in close partnership with Telstra to define the opportunity in terms of transforming the customer experience, the Telstra and AWS teams designed an implementation that takes great advantage of the features of the platform and its array of component technologies that offer great scalability and agility.
“These are cutting edge capabilities we’re adopting, building powerful new offerings for ourselves that demonstrate what’s possible with a cloud contact centre,” says David Aders, Network Engineering Executive. “This was a perfect scenario for demonstrating what’s possible when you combine the Telstra Network and AWS to build a high-performance cloud service.”
The new contact centre was designed to meet four critical demands:
- A complete omnichannel customer experience across voice and text chat.
- Simple self-service options for customers to make changes to their account.
- Empower agent productivity through a pane of glass workspace with efficient task and case management tools and rapid access to information on demand.
- Real-time analytics tools, including conversational analytics and quality metrics to help contact centre leadership to optimise agent performance.
Proactive and responsive problem solving was also declared a must. Finding ways to predict customer needs or create the opportunity for customers to pre-share their needs would speed up the process once a call was initiated, making the experience faster and more satisfying.
This was a perfect scenario for demonstrating what’s possible when you combine the Telstra Network and AWS to build a high-performance cloud service.
David Alders
Networking Engineering Executive, Telstra
Approach
Amazon Connect empowers Telstra CX
Amazon Connect offered many features that made it an attractive choice for Telstra’s new contact centre solution. It offers consumption-based usage with no fixed costs or seat-based licensing, along with deeply flexible controls and options. It is also highly configurable to any specific need and allows for easy integration with a broad ecosystem of other platforms and services – whether for Genesys integration or even Telstra’s TIPT solution.
Telstra built a suite of functions and services across a range of CX layers – customer channels, journey orchestration, performance, and IT Operations. Amazon Connect APIs made Telstra Contact Centre interconnections a comfortable execution process, allowing integrations across a range of other tools and services. AI functionality is being integrated across the Telstra contact centre, from speech and text transcription and analysis, including sentiment analysis, as well as voice biometrics.
“We were able to implement great features that improved the customer experience when calling into our contact centres.
We have already measured the success of the customer ringing in, giving their details once, and have support minimise the number of customer transfers by trying to identify the reason why the customer was calling Telstra” says Aders.
“By integrating into the back-end systems of Telstra’s IT and Network, we were able to serve our customers in a better way, try things out, and see what worked to support both our customers and the agents that were serving them. With AWS support we were able to stage, migrate, and iterate in an incremental way, and not impact customers.”
One of the standout features of Amazon Connect is DigiAssist, allowing customers to directly call customer service through the My Telstra app. DigiAssist validates the call, with no further authentication required to move forward with their query. Customers are now encouraged to start all service calls through the app, including both voice call and message-based enquiries, to take advantage of the query experience.
Improved agent experience
The new agent interface uses a Single Sign-On process with team members now working from multiple locations. Simple controls mean the Telstra softphone is clear and simple to use with all necessary call controls, can be integrated with the customer’s background information and administrative functions are easily accessed and proactively enforced.
Along with the contact centre voice in the IVR now being AI generated, agents also have AI-powered assistance that bring different background information together to help make decisions in real-time. This includes visuals on screen as well as a verbal prompt in their headset to tell them the customer’s name and the reason for the call.
By integrating into the back-end systems of Telstra’s IT and Network, we were able to serve our customers in a better way, try things out, and see what worked to support both our customers and the agents that were serving them. With AWS support we were able to stage, migrate, and iterate in an incremental way, and not impact customers.
David Alders
Networking Engineering Executive, Telstra
Impact
Moving beyond the phone call
In its first year of operations the new Telstra Contact Centre has delivered a significant increase in customer experience outcomes. Thanks to the My Telstra app’s new self-service upgrades, approximately 20% of all queries that start through the app are resolved without intervention from a live service agent.
Telstra is now encouraging customers to begin their support requests through the My Telstra app. With its simpler identity and authentication processes, plus its ability to collect intent prior to the call reaching a staff member, both customers and agents are having a far smoother experience once a call is connected.
“Amazon Connect is making a massive difference for our contact centre agents,” says Childs. “As an agent you get a customer call with the customer already identified, which saves a huge amount of time. You can also get a very simple summary of what the customer is calling about, which makes it much easier to serve the customer.”
Satisfaction data, for customers and agents, is expected to improve when reports flow through in coming months. But internal measures of agent satisfaction are known to correlate with absenteeism, staff churn, and ultimately customer satisfaction scores, so the impacts of improved engagement and sentiment here can see significant benefits over time.
“Amazon Connect is already working to create great experiences for our customers, connecting them to the right person the first time so we can solve their problems faster. And then for our Agents, it’s helping and coaching them so they can create great services for our customers. And we have so much more planned” says Stevens.
Delivering Amazon Connect as a service
Telstra Purple’s consulting-led approach delivers business outcomes customers want to achieve, including self-service at scale, omni-channel experience and rich real-time data for decision making and decision automation.
Packages have now been designed for customers to rapidly deploy a range of core platform options, from basic to comprehensive, as well as add-on packages for service inclusions such as web chat and SMS, administrative options such as Voice ID and CRM integration, and a range of analytics options.
Telstra Purple can offer these packages as a managed service offering to any enterprise looking for a simple solution, or for organisations with expertise Telstra can offer engineering support in blocks of days.
We want to embed AI in products, services and the way decisions are made.
Dayle Stevens
Data and AI Executive, Telstra
Related solutions and capabilities
Amazon AWS
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Network Solutions
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Telstra Purple
Drawing on our rich expertise as a powerhouse tech provider, Telstra Purple delivers digital transformation for Australian business. We do it in a way that other managed services and tech consultancies can’t.
