Hyde Housing were looking to replace their existing telephony platform with a solution that tightly integrated into Salesforce that allowed their staff to make and receive calls directly within Salesforce. The solution was to support 250 users across both internal and external teams. Being an existing AWS customer, they were attracted to the SCV BYOA solution that offered all the benefits of a Salesforce integrated telephony solution but at a lower price point than many competing products.

The solution was to be used by their UK customer services team, and supporting areas including Hyde Property Management, Gas Servicing, Income, Product Quality and Hyde New Homes.

Our remit was to:

• Provide a telephony solution that was seamlessly integrated with Salesforce that would allow their agents and supervisors to make and receive calls through the Salesforce platform.
• Support up to 10 different inbound numbers which were mapped onto different call flows, distinct to the line of business that was being supported.
• Perform an intelligent data dip into Salesforce to identify who the caller was.
• Setup of different environments for Development, Test, UAT and Production.
• Setup of a team calendar which allows for dynamic call routing within the call flows based on the team line being called.
• Provision of a voicemail and callback facility to provide deflection mechanisms within the call flows and to provide call assistance out of hours.
• Assess new SCV release features and make recommendations for usage.
• Provide a suite of reports which identified calls made, received, queue sizes and overall call handling time.

Alscient addressed these requirements in a phased approach. We initially created a design which captured the technical solution. The design described the contact flows and supporting technical components making up the solution. In total fifteen contact flows were created to support the different lines of business. Once the design was signed-off we then built out the required functionality over a series of short delivery sprints. The solution then underwent system testing and UAT testing was performed by Hyde Housing. Training was then provided on the solution (via a Train the Trainer approach). The project from start to finish took 7 weeks to implement.

In addition to making heavy use of Amazon Connect, we used an Amazon Kinesis stream, Amazon S3, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly and a series of AWS Lambdas to coordinate calls across different AWS services and write the details back through to Salesforce.

The project was delivered on time and to budget and represented the first BYOA implementation in EMEA. The customer service agents now have a simplified interface that allows calls to be made and received directly within Salesforce. 250 users are now actively using the solution across the various departments within Hyde Housing.

As a result of the implementation Hyde Housing have seen a reduction in call handling time via timely access to customer data in Salesforce. The sophisticated Tableau reports detail calls handled, calls received, average handling time and calls missed over a selectable data range. Classification of Cases are also directly provided within the agent home page. A scheduled pull of data is also taken from Salesforce across on to AWS for ingestion by a WFM solution. The omni supervisor view also provides supervisors with the ability to easily see real-time activity by team from directly within Salesforce.

Hyde Housing is a leading and award-winning provider of affordable housing in London, the South East of England and neighbouring areas. Their main business is to provide and manage good quality and safe accommodation, at prices people can afford to buy or rent on long tenancies.