Air Canada Cargo Drops AHT by 2 Minutes with Salesforce and Amazon Connect

The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily shifted the business model for Air Canada to focus on cargo. Facing a near complete shutdown with its passenger planes grounded, the airline pivoted to handle a dramatic rise in cargo shipments of life-saving equipment. However, its reliance on conventional, siloed customer service methodologies wasn’t workable with as the airline operated over 13,000 cargo-only flights during the Pandemic and introduced dedicated cargo only freighters.

“We used to manually calculate our daily volume and agent workload. With minimal telephony functionality with no ability to scale, we relied on standard business tools such as Excel,” recalled Sebastian Cosgrove, director, global customer service at Air Canada Cargo. Apart from basic analytics from its telephony solution, Air Canada Cargo had minimal visibility on overall wait times for calls and agent productivity, relying heavily on anecdotal reporting.

Air Canada Cargo implemented Salesforce Service Cloud Voice (SCV) that natively integrates Amazon Connect into AWS Partner Salesforce platform to deliver a modern contact center solution. This brings together voice conversations, digital channels, and customer relationship management (CRM) data in real time. SCV offers voice transcription from Amazon Connect that allows agents to pull up call and CRM data side by side in the Service Cloud console. Pre-integrated cloud telephony, automatic speech recognition, and sentiment analysis help to simplify omnichannel routing, enabling agents to resolve issues rapidly and deliver personalized customer service. Further, SCV generates a 360-degree view of each customer and automates routine tasks, including metrics and report generation.

“We can now link knowledge articles and integrate interactive voice response (IVR) with case management. This means that our agents can see everything across sales and service in an omnichannel environment. They already know what you’re calling about based on your case number, and we’re starting to use artificial intelligence (AI) to build on that capability,” explained Cosgrove.

The airline has gained measurable call center improvements from SCV. For example, Air Canada Cargo has reduced costs by reducing average call handle time (AHT). Between omnichannel capabilities, integrations, in-call intelligence, process automation, and instant access to Customer 360 data, AHT dropped by 2 minutes in just six months of implementing the solution.

An improved IVR with a more logical flow also dropped call abandonment rates by 0.5 percent. With case management integration, the IVR system saves customers time on preliminaries and redirects calls more accurately. Agent productivity is also on the rise because Air Canada Cargo can triage agents based on the demand, and this has led to a 20 percent increase in agent productivity. And finally, the effort and error avoided on manual monitoring and quality assurance has been a significant one for Air Canada Cargo.

In addition to improving call center performance, SCV and Amazon Connect also enables remote work for agents, which improves the overall agent experience. As a result, Air Canada Cargo employees enjoy work in the contact center. “We previously had issues retaining staff in the contact center. Now, thanks to the way that the work has been revolutionized, they want to work here and enjoy it,” said Cosgrove.

Air Canada Cargo is exploring both horizontal expansion and additional capabilities for its contact center. The airline can now replicate its contact centers virtually thanks to the global availability of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. Air Canada Cargo is taking advantage of this to explore opening contact centers outside of the traditional Toronto and Montreal locations. Expanding both locally and globally, has a three-fold benefit for the airline: ensuring business continuity with remote work; leveraging the knowledge of agents in a particular location to address local issues; and taking advantage of labor arbitrage in different geographies. It is also exploring the expansion of its current AI capabilities to further improve its contact center services.