DXC Transforms Service Desks and Improves Customer Experience with Amazon Connect

By the end of 2020, Forrester predicts that robotic process automation will automate one out of five repeatable tasks in customer service organizations. Amid such industry disruption, DXC Technology leads digital transformation for its clients by modernizing and integrating their mainstream IT, specifically customer engagement technology. The company’s global service desk operations utilize contact centers to serve more than eight million users in 56 languages across 50 locations.

In 2018, the company unveiled a new service delivery model to drive automation across all lines of business, including service desks. Like many of its peers, DXC’s legacy contact center technology was costly to operate, difficult to integrate, and hard to innovate. After a thorough evaluation, DXC decided to replace legacy technology with Amazon Connect, the cloud contact center service from Amazon Web Services (AWS). DXC is now applying key elements of automation from AWS including artificial intelligence (AI), asynchronous chat, and automatic speech recognition, as well as natural language processing and understanding to innovate its service experience for customers.

DXC is an AWS Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner that helps its clients transition to a cloud-based architecture. The company is both a customer of Amazon Connect and a vendor, offering call centers as a service built on Amazon Connect to its global clients. “With AWS, our team recognized a strategic collaborator with a forward-looking platform that had substantial synergies with DXC’s focus and investments,” says Purusharth Tripathi, vice president of Asia Core Delivery at DXC. “In particular, we saw major benefits in using Amazon Connect for innovating the customer experience and its potential for easy integration with our AI-based automation platform.” As a result, DXC is now migrating 1,000 service desk seats in Kuala Lumpur and Manila to Amazon Connect.

Amazon Connect redefines customer experience. For example, contact centers have traditionally greeted callers with an interactive voice response (IVR) that offers a list of options to select from. Amazon Connect can personalize and automate calls or chats, greet customers by name, predict why they are communicating, and seek to resolve their issues or connect them to a service desk operator when needed. Furthermore, Amazon Connect and AWS Lambda make it easy to differentiate and enhance the service experience by accessing data from disparate systems and sources. The native integration of Amazon Connect with AWS Lambda removes traditional barriers to accessing digital APIs for mobile applications and websites, and the common languages supported by Lambda simplify use for developers.

DXC is improving the service experience by applying complementary AWS machine learning services such as Amazon Polly for text-to-speech technology, Amazon Lex to enable conversational bots, and Amazon Pinpoint for personalized messaging. In addition, DXC leverages the AWS community of third-party independent software vendors, integrating its service desks with leading customer relationship management (CRM) software, workforce management (WFM) systems, and voice biometrics for identity verification. In Asia, the company has developed integration with the ServiceNow system, which enables a majority of its service interactions.

Callers now benefit from enhanced customer experience. They don’t have to repeat themselves if they speak to an agent because their personalized data is presented to the agent or captured during the automated interaction that begins each call.

When a customer is connected to an agent, the agent has all relevant information on screen. This has contributed to an average reduction in handling time of 1 minute per call in countries where DXC has implemented Amazon Connect. In addition, agents are spending 20 percent less time on follow-up calls for existing service tickets.

DXC has also reduced the lead time to edit and change call flow messaging on its IVR system. With its previous technology, it took two months to make changes to IVR scripts because DXC had to retain a professional voice-over actor and employ a specialized engineer to upload any change. With Amazon Polly, it only takes hours, and voices are available in 29 languages including Mandarin, Japanese, and Hindi to accommodate DXC’s expanding customer base in Asia.

Using Amazon Connect, DXC has been able to automate password resets, so the number of calls that get transferred to an agent has dropped by 30–60 percent. Onboarding new customers has also been simplified. “It typically takes us three months to complete migration or onboard a new customer onto our telephony platform,” notes Tripathi. “With Amazon Connect, we have reduced this to two months. Moreover, for a single country implementation, it will take just five weeks.”

Overall, the rollout of Amazon Connect allows DXC to reinvent the customer journey and design smart service experiences. “We are creating transformation roadmaps for our customers that will enable cost reduction and offer more value propositions using available AWS assets,” Tripathi says.

DXC anticipates an internal cost reduction of 30–40 percent as a result of implementing Amazon Connect, thanks to increased automation and improved productivity on each call. In Asia, the company is currently developing API integrations with other partners in addition to ServiceNow and claims first-mover advantage with its cloud-based service centers in the region. Tripathi concludes, “With AWS services, we can capitalize on our experience in innovation and development to create digital solutions as a competitive differentiator.”

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