Executive Summary

A leading e-commerce automotive retailer in the U.S. faced challenges related to cloud-based contact center services, financial constraints, and operational inefficiencies, which impeded their customer service operations and business processes. To address these issues, the company integrated Amazon Connect and ServiceNow, leveraging AWS’s cloud-based contact center service and ServiceNow’s automation capabilities to streamline customer service operations, improve efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction.

Partnering with AHEAD, an AWS Partner, the company implemented a custom integration layer and a purpose-built Custom Call Center Panel (CCP) WebApp, transitioning to a flexible and cost-effective AWS Serverless architecture, which reduced operational costs and improved scalability. As a result, the automotive retailer achieved significant improvements in operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Client Challenge

The company faced several challenges, including the need for a cloud-based contact center service, financial constraints, and operational inefficiencies. The company sought to enhance the user experience and augment customer service operations. Additionally, the automotive retailer had limited automation and needed to streamline operations to improve its business processes.

Why AWS?

Built from the ground up as a unified omnichannel solution, Amazon Connect is an AI-powered, easy-to-use cloud contact center solution that helps enterprises deliver superior customer service at a lower cost. Amazon Connect uses AI/ML technology, such as Amazon Bedrock, to optimize service and performance capabilities so that businesses can proactively detect and address issues with customer experience, agent performance, and contact center operations.

Amazon Connect enables clients to design their own contact flows and IVR menus to route incoming calls to the appropriate agents or self-service options. It also has multiple native integrations with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3 for call recordings, Amazon Lex for creating chatbots, and Lambda for custom processing.

ServiceNow is a powerful cloud-based platform that helps organizations automate and streamline their business processes. It offers a range of applications for facilitating business processes, centralizing workflows, improving efficiency, and enhancing customer satisfaction.

The integration of Amazon Connect with ServiceNow allows organizations to enhance customer service operations by efficiently routing calls, creating tickets, and tracking customer inquiries. Automation capabilities helped eliminate repetitive manual tasks and improve business processes. Additionally, call center agents benefit from a seamless experience with access to customer information via Amazon Connect and ServiceNow ticket details within their custom contact control panel interface.

Why the Car Company Chose AHEAD

Due to the executive visibility of this project, plus ongoing needs and requirements, the company chose to work with AHEAD on this engagement because they didn’t have the expertise in-house at that time and needed a partner with experience facilitating implementation and ongoing adoption for enterprise customers. AHEAD expertly integrated its Professional and Managed Services to deliver continuous value to the company. Post-project, the client’s team confidently navigated the learning curve of a new platform, supported by AHEAD’s Day Two Engineering Managed Services. By maintaining an ongoing partnership, AHEAD’s Managed delivery team ensures the platform remains fully operational, resilient, and architected for minimal downtime.

AHEAD Solution Description

AHEAD provided a comprehensive solution to the company’s challenges, implementing a custom integration layer that enabled Amazon Connect to initiate API requests to ServiceNow for enhanced service delivery. AHEAD developed a customized, purpose-built Custom Call Center Panel (CCP) WebApp to serve as a central hub for service calls to both Connect API and ServiceNow. As part of the ongoing engagement, AHEAD transitioned to a flexible, cost-effective AWS Serverless architecture to ensure costs aligned with actual usage and offered scalability.

By utilizing AWS Lambda, organizations can construct a customized integration layer to seamlessly synchronize data between Amazon Connect and ServiceNow. This enables a smooth and efficient flow of information, resulting in faster and more accurate customer service delivery.

Results / Benefits

Call center agents benefit from an enhanced user experience that seamlessly integrates caller data from both Amazon Connect and ServiceNow. This optimized user experience empowers agents with a comprehensive view of caller information, helping them to provide personalized and efficient customer service. Agents can access a unified dataset that has relevant customer details and ticket information.

A holistic view of a customer’s data equips agents with the right information to deliver exceptional service and effectively resolve customer inquiries. It is accomplished through the development of a customized and purpose-built Custom Call Center Panel (CCP) WebApp. This web application serves as a central hub that enables seamless and efficient service calls to both the Amazon Connect API and ServiceNow via the custom integration layer.

The seamless integration between Amazon Connect and ServiceNow was achieved by building on AWS Serverless offerings, eliminating the need for infrastructure management. Using this pay-as-you-go automatic scaling system, organizations can ensure their costs align with actual usage. By paying for only the resources they use, organizations can achieve the type of flexibility and cost optimization they are relentlessly trying to achieve.

Next Steps / Future Plans

Post-engagement, AHEAD maintains an ongoing dialogue with the company team to refine the Amazon Connect/ServiceNow solution as all parties explore a potential second phase of the engagement.

AWS Services Utilized in Client Engagement

• Amazon Connect
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
• Amazon Lex
• AWS Serverless Architecture
• AWS API Gateway
• Amazon DynamoDB
• AWS CloudFormation
• AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management)
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS Step Functions
• AWS X-Ray