Here is a detailed summary of the key takeaways from the video transcription in markdown format:
Air Canada's Journey to Transform Customer Experience with Amazon Connect
Emerging Trends and Challenges in Customer Experience
- Customers are experiencing disconnected journeys, where there is no contextual information passed when escalating from self-service to agent assistance.
- Agents often struggle with inefficient workflows, toggling between multiple backend systems to serve customers.
- Supervisors and managers lack access to integrated data, making it difficult to monitor, measure, and improve business outcomes.
- IT leaders face technology barriers, leading to slow innovation, high costs, and long implementation timelines.
- Organizations are struggling to keep up with the increasing customer expectations for support.
The Importance of Self-Service and IVR
- 46% of customers would rather go to the dentist than talk to a contact center.
- 70% of customers prefer to self-serve, but when they need to escalate, the experience must be seamless.
- IVR remains the most important connection between companies and customers, accounting for twice as many interactions as live agents.
- Next-generation IVR systems can deliver a 5-fold improvement in customer satisfaction scores and substantially reduce the number of live agent calls.
How Amazon Connect Solves Customer Experience Challenges
- Amazon Connect leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance self-service experiences, increase containment, and empower agents.
- Features like conversational analytics, real-time fraud authentication, and generative AI-powered agent assist and self-service deliver significant efficiencies and cost savings.
- Amazon Q&A in Connect, a new generative AI assistant, can now be used for end-customer self-service experiences, creating more personalized and capable interactions.
Air Canada's Transformation Journey
Passenger Experience Transformation
- Air Canada faced increasing call volumes, manual queue processing, and siloed legacy systems, leading to high wait times and customer frustration.
- By adopting Amazon Connect, Air Canada was able to shift to a unified experience with embedded self-service options, improving key metrics:
- 15% reduction in overall contact center volumes
- 8% reduction in abandonment rates
- 78% of informational calls handled within the IVR
- 20-second reduction in average handle time
- 190 FTE savings, equating to $4.7 million CAD
Cargo Experience Transformation
- Air Canada Cargo's pre-modernization process was highly manual, with agents working from email inboxes and limited visibility into queues and wait times.
- By integrating Salesforce Service Cloud and Amazon Connect, Air Canada Cargo achieved:
- 5% reduction in abandonment rates
- 120-second (2-minute) reduction in average handle time
- 20% improvement in agent productivity
- Fully automated quality assurance process, reducing time from 89 hours to real-time
Lessons Learned and Future Outlook
- Extend timelines and carefully manage scope to ensure a successful and meaningful transformation.
- Focus on the people aspect, engaging employees early and providing the necessary training and change management support.
- Ensure a solid knowledge management foundation to support the AI-powered capabilities.
- Leverage the full capabilities of the chosen platform, reading the contract to understand what features are available.
- Continued focus on self-service and agent assist capabilities, leveraging generative AI to enhance the customer and agent experience.