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Moving your Contact Center to The Cloud - The Benefits for Federal Agencies

As government agencies strive to provide a robust customer experience, they are also burdened with the responsibility of ensuring that constituent data is safe and the solution is cost effective. While migrating storage and database solutions to the cloud is quite common, migrating the contact center workload to the cloud has several advantages for the government.

There are many options for cloud-based contact centers, however many of these solutions are simply the same technology but on a hosted and/or managed platform. For agencies who are seeking innovation as part of their cloud journey, these solutions might not be the right fit.

Amazon Connect, part of Amazon Web Services, is redefining contact center technology and is the cloud contact center solution that can help the Federal Government transform how they engage with their customers.

Cloud-Based

With a cloud-based contact center, government agencies can operate with agility and flexibility when modernizing the contact center. An agile approach to cloud modernization minimizes the need to overprovision resources to manage peak capacity, instead allowing the government to implement customer experiences iteratively and incrementally. Agencies can make small changes to the contact center, adapting the approach as needed to stay agile. The contact center stack becomes an ever-changing product, evolving with the technology to meet the government’s requirements. With Amazon Connect, agencies no longer need to provision licenses or servers to create a new customer experience.

Extensibility

Extensibility is the most compelling reason for the Government to implement Amazon Connect. While Amazon Connect delivers the core routing functionality of a traditional ACD, its programmatic design enables the functions of the contact center to easily extend across tools and platforms. While traditional ACD solutions require an integration layer that sits between source and destination, Amazon Connect embeds serverless compute functionality within the contact flow, using AWS Lambda, enabling seamless integration. Additionally, all functionality provided by Amazon Connect can be delivered programmatically. As agencies continue to iterate on the mission of transforming Federal customer service, Amazon Connect can deliver engagement channels that align and can scale with any digital strategy.

Scalability & Reliability

Amazon Connect uses the same AWS services that hundreds of Federal agencies use. With the AWS Global Infrastructure as its backbone, Amazon Connect can scale to accommodate any surge in capacity that the Government may experience without any changes in infrastructure. Amazon Connect also inherits the durability and resiliency of the global infrastructure. Availability Zones are connected to each other with fast, private fiber-optic networking, enabling customers to easily architect applications that automatically fail over between Availability Zones without interruption. To better isolate any issues and achieve high availability, applications are partitioned across multiple Availability Zones in the same AWS Region. Regions are isolated from each other, meaning that a disruption in one Region does not result in disruption in other Regions.

Cost-Effective

Amazon Connect is a pay-per-use service, so agencies only pay for resources consumed—pricing is not based on peak capacity, agent seats, or maintenance. There are no minimum monthly fees, long-term commitments, or upfront license charges. With Amazon Connect, customers can save up to 80% in costs compared to traditional contact center solutions. Additionally, features to enhance the customer experience can be built without having to procure additional software. The only cost is the implementation expense and consumption costs.

Amazon Connect provides an integrated user experience minimizing the number of tools needed, which also lowers the costs required to maintain a contact center solution. For example, Amazon Connect Contact Lens, a feature for sentiment and trend analytics, has an integrated reporting functionality which mitigates the costs of having to build a custom reporting and analytics solution. Amazon Connect Capacity Planning and Forecasting provides AI/ML driven workforce management functionality with the Amazon Connect interface.

Security & Compliance

Amazon Connect customers benefit from the rigorous security standards that are in place to protect the most sensitive workloads. Amazon Connect is FedRAMP Moderate in the US-East and US-West commercial regions as well as FedRAMP High in the GovCloud US-West region. AWS facilitates data protection practices such as encryption, identity and access management using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and tracking API and user activity using AWS CloudTrail.

Speed of Delivery

Because Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center solution, there are no hardware or software components to provision. As long as the agency has an AWS account, STS can build the contact center. Additionally, with STS’s deep expertise in delivering Amazon Connect for the Federal government, integrations and customizations are part of our standard implementation model. Implementations can be done as quickly as 6 weeks, from design to Go-Live.