As part of the Council’s response to the coronavirus we had to set up a new call centre for the Community Hub. The aim of the hub is to ensure that assistance is directed to the most vulnerable in the Borough. Whilst we were trying to estimate the volume of phone calls we might receive into the centre, it quickly became apparent that we may fall short of the capacity required.
We discussed the issue with our Amazon Web Services account manager, Katie Blunt and by the next morning we’d had a call with AWS and VoiceFoundry.com along with an offer to stand up a dedicated call centre solution for us overnight.
Our team were able to quickly pull together the details such as call routing design and estimates of call volumes and agents and began working with VoiceFoundry on implementing the solution.
Amazon Web Services have provided the infrastructure for free and VoiceFoundry’s excellent team provided the commissioning work for free too.
The solution is built on Amazon Connect and the call centre agent interface is browser based and extremely simple to use with nothing to install.
We’ve received fantastic support from both AWS and VoiceFoundry.com to get this up and running and today we’ve gone live with the solution taking calls from the public. Our sincere thanks to Katie at Amazon Web Services and to Daniel and Asad at VoiceFoundry.com for their support at this challenging time.
We’ll also be looking next at integrating automated call answering using Amazon Lex conversational voice and text interfaces to further develop the solution and expand the capacity of the call centre team and extend the contact centre capabilities into the web.
All part of our approach to the Digital Strategy.