Avran supported this University with the deployment of Amazon Connect to support A-Level results clearing and confirmation

The Challenge

In previous years the University has used several on-prem Telephony solutions to support the rapid increase in calls at this time of year. These solutions had been lacking in many areas and have required permanent onsite equipment and carrier capability. There has been limited reporting but also in some years agents have resorted to using their mobiles to answer calls with rudimentary call forwarding in place. The University had been looking for a more flexible and cost-effective way of handling the Clearing and Confirmation Day challenge. In previous years they have received up to 9000 calls on A level results day and there have previously been issue around PSTN and platform scaling. The University also has public facing numbers with PSTN carriers which terminate at on prem SIP SBCs. Due to the uncertain circumstances around Covid and A level results this year, the University IT infrastructure teams were under immense pressure to ensure that the Contact Centre for Clearing and Confirmation worked seamlessly and had asked for multiple contingencies in the event of platform failures as any lost contacts could potentially have a large financial impact.

The Solution

Amazon Connect was identified as the primary Contact Centre with failover to be provided by a combination of PSTN routing and the existing on-prem systems. Avran was engaged to provide Amazon Connect and Voice Architecture expertise. Avran audited the Amazon Connect build, PSTN design and on-prem platforms and provided a High-Level Voice design and Amazon Connect contact flow diagrams. Time of day routing was deployed along with DTMF IVRs, Estimated Wait Time announcement and Call Queuing. One of the Contact Flows was built with customer DTMF data input of a student number which was then presented in a screen pop up on the Agent voice client.

A Cloudwatch dashboard was built and published to various department heads who could monitor what was happening on peak day in real time and re-assign resources accordingly. Avran provided support on results day and made changes to contact flows as required by the University.

Avran provided a detailed billing and queue/agent reporting breakdown to the University for the week preceding, the week after results day and results day itself. The Amazon Connect platform had PSTN calls routed to it from the 2^nd August with results day being on the 10^th August.

Results and Benefits

The University Telecoms team received excellent feedback from the University departments and recognition on how smoothly the Amazon Connect service performed. The Amazon Connect platforms handled all calls presented without any issue. The Amazon Connect instance handled @3000 calls with maximum concurrent calls of @115. 45 configured agents handled calls over the peak periods during August.