Alscient addressed these requirements in a phased approach. We initially evaluated several leading telephony platforms against the wider set of requirements and shortlisted it down to two. Amazon Connect was finally chosen due to its “pay-as-you-go” cost model and its seamless integration with Salesforce.
The rollout was planned over a six-month period with internal teams scheduled to initially go live. Following testing of the core flows and the customer experience against a smaller user base, the solution was launched. Over a series of releases, a large proportion of the teams within WDH were onboarded across to Amazon Connect. A custom softphone solution was used by some of the teams to allow calls to be paused and resumed in real-time. This made use of a static page hosted within S3 which was surfaced via a CloudFront distribution. Amazon Athena was also used to provide SQL like query capability against the Contact Trace Records. We also made heavy use of Polly to play different voice prompts based on IVR menu selection and used AWS Lambda to directly interrogate an out of hours support roster which was maintained inside of Salesforce. Integration with Active Directory was also provided to seamlessly sign into Amazon Connect via the setup of an IAM Identity Provider inside of AWS.
In total over 100 team queues were created on the new platform and innovate features such as the ability to request callbacks were provided. Once the last team was migrated across, all of the numbers from the old solution were ported to Amazon Connect. This was done without any downtime or impact on the caller experience.
