The UK’s leading supermarket bank needed to enable its call centre staff to work remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, but was held back by its existing technology and physical office location.
When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, a leading supermarket bank needed to enable 300 call centre staff to work remotely. While their call-handling system was largely automated, at the moment a customer wanted to speak to a human, the system routed the call to a physical call centre. However, with the urgent need for staff to work from home, the physical call centre became less viable, and so the bank decided to devise a new disaster recovery plan that would also offer further strategic improvements.
Infinity Works carried out a discovery exercise to find the best solution to the need for a fully remote call centre. We recommended Amazon Connect and presented a proof-of-concept demonstration to senior stakeholders. The bank then used the findings to inform on a full replacement for their call centre, to integrate existing interactive voice responses (IVRs) and top-level menu, and transferring customers to remotely-located human beings as required.
While intended primarily as a disaster recovery project, the solution presented the opportunity to make a number of strategic improvements including a focus on the customer experience strategy. The existing platform was expensive, inflexible, and long lead-times were required for any change to the IVR structure. The new system would address these issues, and would moreover open up new possibilities for better integration with back end systems and sentiment analysis, furthering customer self-service automation. Authentication with the bank’s existing Active Directory federated access control platform was proven, enabling the bank to require multi-factor authentication for access to the call centre from employees’ remote locations.
