Emma Button, COO at nubeGo, discusses our transition to Amazon Connect and how it could benefit your business.
As COO of nubeGo, it is my responsibility to ensure that our business is resilient to the sorts of challenges that COVID-19 presents us with. This week, as our operations have all moved from HQ to home-office. I’ve been thankful for our cloud-first approach to business tooling, especially our customer contact centre which we built earlier this year using Amazon Connect.
Little did I know back in January that the Business Continuity Plan (BCP) I was writing was going to be quite so relevant. For us, as a cloud-native organisation with a globally-distributed team, a BCP recovery plan was fairly straightforward; 100% of our infrastructure is cloud-based, and 100% of the tools that we employ are SaaS products which are accessible from anywhere, at any time. When we select our tools, we ensure that our suppliers have a demonstrable high-availability plan, or that we have a plan B in place for any data that we couldn’t live without, should that tool become unavailable.
One of the biggest challenges that companies can face when planning a remote-friendly workplace, is how to manage their customer contact centre in a way which supports a mobile and distributed workforce. That’s where Amazon Connect comes in, nubeGo’s own phone system is now fully running using Amazon Connect, which is a cloud-based multi-channel customer contact system which supports telephone call queuing, routing and automated chat workflows. Using Connect, we have been able to move our entire business operations out of the office and into the homes of our team members in the UK, Europe and Latin America with no difference in service for our customers.
Amazon Connect uses a drag-and-drop interface that allows you to design your automated voice interactions and call routing. Configuring your Amazon Connect workflow is fast (as our awesome intern will tell you) and, if a particular area of your call workflow isn’t working for your callers, then you can change it in seconds.
For us, having a cloud-based call center has helped us spread the workload for answering our customer support calls. This time last year, our team had one telephone number and call-forwarding enabled to a mobile handset sitting in our office, with one poor soul having to take the mobile with them wherever they went. That wasn’t scalable! Now that we’re using Amazon Connect, everyone can answer our phones, with support calls being routed to our technical support team and sales calls routing to our sales and marketing team. We answer our calls through our laptops, using them as smart phones, but you can also use Amazon Connect to a desk handset, if that suits you better.
For nubeGo, Connect is very cost effective. An always-on contact centre with soft phones for all our team members could have stretched our finances, but Amazon Connect costs less than a traditional contact center system. With Amazon Connect you pay only for the time you spend interacting with customers, plus any associated telephony and messaging charges. There’s no fixed monthly fee or long-term commitment (we could stop using it tomorrow, if we wanted to!). And importantly, for an SME like ours, the pricing is not based on peak capacity, agent seats, or an annual maintenance contract of any sort.
Amazon Connect isn’t just for receiving phone calls, we’re also now starting to use the web chat tool for interacting with our customers and you’ll definitely see more of this in the future. The interaction workflows are the same, so once you understand how to use the phone system, you’ll understand how to use the chat tool too. Our team members are also starting to use the outbound calling capabilities from Amazon Connect - this means that there is no need for us to supply most of our home-workers with company phones, as we can all make and receive calls through our computers.
For the technologist in me, perhaps the thing I find most fascinating about Amazon Connect is the recording and analytics capabilities. Connect can record calls for staff training and quality purposes, to help you learn from your customer interactions - feeding directly into a culture of continuous improvement. For our own contact centre, we are currently working on employing Contact Lens, a set of Machine Learning models that provide sentiment analysis, trend analysis and data capture which provides a unique insight into our customer’s interactions with us.
If you’d like a quick trial of Amazon Connect for your own business, or if you’d like to learn more about it’s capabilities, set up a demo call with one of our team today:
https://meetings.hubspot.com/fernandohonig/contact-centre-demo We’d love to share the Amazon Connect love!
Why not call our contact centre on 0203 901 8501 and hear Amazon Connect in action?
0203 901 8501 www.nubego.io/amazon-connect