Northumberland County Council Enhances Citizen Engagement Using Amazon Connect

As one of the largest councils in North East England, Northumberland County Council (NCC) needed a scalable and flexible contact centre to support its 316,000 citizens. The organisation was using an on-premises solution that was quickly nearing the end of its life. Wanting to modernise and enhance citizen engagement, NCC began exploring a new communications solution alongside Mason Advisory, a digital, data, and technology advisory firm.

With the support of Mason Advisory, NCC identified Amazon Connect, a simple-to-use omnichannel cloud contact centre from Amazon Web Services (AWS), as its optimal solution. Alongside Mission Labs, an AWS Partner, NCC built and deployed a new contact centre in only 3 months, expanding its communications capabilities while reducing manual labour.

Founded in 2009, NCC is a unitary local government authority that provides over 35 key services to its citizens, such as tax collection and benefits distribution. In 2020 NCC quickly realised that its 11-year-old contact centre was no longer meeting its performance requirements. “Our legacy contact centre was very expensive to maintain and required significant amounts of engineering support,” says Chris Thompson, director of information technology at NCC. “It was also difficult to patch and costly for the capabilities that we were getting from it.” To improve engagement and streamline customer support, NCC needed to update its contact centre.

While developing a communications strategy, NCC and Mason Advisory began exploring alternative solutions. Mason Advisory recommended that NCC adopt Amazon Connect. “NCC wanted to open new communication channels to citizens, automate high-volume and low-complexity tasks, and had a preference to build in-house solutions rather than buy,” says Adam Todd, principal consultant at Mason Advisory. “Amazon Connect was the only solution that met these needs at the maturity level that NCC required.” Using Amazon Connect, NCC also mitigates security threats and no longer needs to patch the legacy contact centre by itself. Under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, it can delegate infrastructure security responsibilities to AWS, reducing manual labour and freeing resources.

In January 2021 NCC engaged Mission Labs to develop a proof of concept for the contact centre. Mission Labs is a software implementation company that has completed the AWS Public Sector Partner Program, which validates AWS Partners with cloud-based solutions supporting government, space, education, and nonprofit organisations.

Work began on the proof of concept in April 2021. By July 2021 the proof of concept was completed, empowering the three teams to begin migrating NCC’s contact centre to Amazon Connect. Because Mission Labs understands UK governmental requirements, it could architect the solution according to AWS best practices, and no rebuild was required to move the proof of concept into a fully productionised environment. NCC was operating a fully functioning contact centre on AWS by July 2021. “Similar types of projects require a 6–12-month implementation, at least,” says Thompson. “Using Amazon Connect, we had an operational service up and running in just over 3 months without any impact to citizens.”

By adopting Amazon Connect, NCC can enhance communications with its citizens, take more calls, and provide a higher quality of service. The solution is highly scalable and operates at higher reliability than NCC’s on-premises contact centre, which saw frequent downtime. The council also enjoys greater flexibility on AWS. Previously, it would take 1–2 days and third-party tools to update the on-premises solution, but NCC can now scale quickly to support new teams and use cases on demand. Because Amazon Connect is cloud native, NCC can also facilitate remote work. “Now, NCC has agents who can work from anywhere, fully functional,” says Todd. “That has made a big difference for its business continuity, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.” As of December 2021, 90 contact centre agents were using the solution.

NCC’s AWS-powered contact centre is designed to support rapid change. When Storm Arwen affected Northumberland in November 2021, the council saw an increase in calls from affected citizens and needed to open its contact centre remotely. On AWS, contact centre agents were able to work from home, respond to these calls, and quickly deploy emergency support as needed. NCC seamlessly scaled to support increased demand and remote operations with no additional licensing, configuration, or changes needed.

The contact centre uses Mission Labs’ SmartAgent as its interface, which uses APIs to centralise all communications channels, including voice, chat, email, social, SMS, and video. “SmartAgent provides a single view of omnichannel communications for Amazon Connect, and it’s all based on AWS,” says Matt Cowell, sales and marketing director at Mission Labs. “Using SmartAgent, the right information can reach an agent at the right time so that they can support the contact in the most efficient manner.” On SmartAgent, agents can view customer information and history as soon as a contact arrives, which reduces the number of browser tabs and spreadsheets that agents are using daily. This solution also generates automatic reports so that NCC can check quality assurance scores and performance among its agents. The council uses SmartAgent insights to support management and training decisions.

By centralising all communications on Amazon Connect, NCC contact centre agents can serve citizens faster and provide higher-quality services. NCC has seen high levels of satisfaction among its agents using the solution. “All of the feedback that we have received from agents was that the contact centre has improved,” says Todd. “Agents can perform their jobs more quickly and more simply.”

On AWS, NCC has expanded citizen engagement and improved the quality of its services. During the next phase of its digital transformation, it will expand its usage of Amazon Connect to departments outside of its main call centre, such as Revenue and Benefits and Active Northumberland. NCC also plans to implement automated bots to handle simple communications and automate several components of its services. This plan will further reduce manual labour and call volumes, freeing up resources so that staff can increase focus on important community needs, like helping the more vulnerable. “There are several opportunities to continue to develop the contact centre and to change the way that we work across the organisation,” says Thompson. “Migrating to Amazon Connect has been fantastic, and this journey has opened our eyes in terms of what is possible compared to traditional solutions.”