Accenture’s Unified Agent Portal on AWS Improves Customer Experience and Reduces Operational Cost

By Tarun Mehra (Accenture), Shawn Guenther (Accenture), Kat Ferguson (AWS), Anil Taneja (AWS), and Dilin Joy (AWS)

Accenture

Customers expect omnichannel digital experiences while interacting with brands. Organizations trying to present that seamless brand experience can struggle with mechanisms to integrate internal, and often third-party, systems in a way that tangibly increases productivity without breaking the bank.

Streamlining omnichannel interactions into easy-to-learn and easy-to-use agent tools, while providing agents with meaningful real-time customer insights and analytics, is cumbersome for organizations to implement.

Organizations who want to increase customer acquisition, customer loyalty, customer engagement, and drive growth need to think about delivering more exceptional brand experiences.

How can you create and deliver consistent, convenient, and unified customer experiences that drive growth?

Accenture’s Connected Customer Experience, or CCE, solves these challenges through its Unified Agent Portal (UAP), which provides truly omnichannel (voice, chat, SMS, email, and video) interaction handling, ticket management, dashboards and reporting, and role-based views for agents and supervisors in a user-friendly single pane of glass.

In this post, we will introduce how the Accenture UAP solution can transform brand capabilities to improve customer experiences and enable cost reductions.

Accenture is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Services Provider (MSP) that provides end-to-end solutions for migrating to and managing operations on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Solution Overview

Accenture’s CCE offering uses predictive data insights and artificial intelligence (AI) to transform organizations’ customer service capabilities. CCE is powered by machine learning (ML) and AI services like Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex, strategic vendor partners, and Accenture software and experience.

CCE provides personalized human and AI interactions that delight customers, and help achieve higher customer satisfaction scores, greater workforce satisfaction scores, reduced handling times, and increased customer loyalty.

The Unified Agent Portal is a software application created by Accenture for use by contact center agents and supervisors. UAP’s core is built around Amazon Connect and a variety of associated services that are leveraged to provide a differentiated set of features.

UAP is an omnichannel, multitenant, cloud-native, serverless productivity tool which streamlines voice, chat, video, and digital interactions into a single interface. It gives agents access to real-time customer insights, agent assistance, and analytics to put more information at agents’ fingertips to handle customers better and faster. For supervisors, it provides vital contact center metrics and agent management capabilities to ease management complexity.

Figure 1 – Unified Agent Portal overview.

UAP is well-suited across industries and contact center use cases, including customer care, IT and HR help desks, citizen contact centers, sales assistance, and registration, subscription, retention teams in addition to clinical trial support.

Improve Customer Experience and Reduce Operational Costs

UAP offers capabilities such as a persona-driven user interface (UI), unified customer view, and customizable integrations.

• Persona-driven UI: Customers expect efficient assistance from brands. UAP provides role-based functionality to give each agent access to the channels, customer data, and performance information they need to serve customers best in their specific role.
• Unified customer view: Customers expect channel of choice. Regardless of channel, UAP allows agents to communicate with them and access all of their relevant information from multiple data sources on a single screen.
• Customizable integrations: Organizations often have customer data in disparate systems, making it difficult to draw common value for their workforce. UAP provides a customizable look and feel and the ability to integrate to customer relationship management (CRM), case management, and customer data platforms to provide the unified customer view. Knowledge articles and systems to power AI-driven agent assistance and enterprise systems bring in additional channels for a completely tailored deployment.

With Accenture Connected Customer Experience and UAP, organizations can drive better customer experiences that benefit both customers and businesses:

• Up to 15% increase in customer lifetime value and 3x increase in customer satisfaction.
• Up to 15% revenue increase.
• Up to 15% reduction in agent handling time.
• Reduce operational expense by 10-40%.

Figure 2 – Unified Agent Portal dashboard.

UAP lets customers engage with businesses through their preferred channel, and streamlines interactions to allow agents to more effectively focus on complex issues. Agents are empowered to improve their performance through real-time information on key performance indicators (KPIs) and service-level matrices.

Figure 3 – UAP agent experience.

• Improved customer experience: Natural interactive voice response (IVR) and interactive chatbots make engagement fast and easy for customers.
• Improved agent experience: One consolidated view of customer data and knowledge articles; reduces the need for agents to navigate to multiple pages or search databases.
• Time and cost savings: Making changes is easy with an intuitive UI that allows users to create voice and chat contact flows or agent tasks without any coding, rather than custom development that can take months.

Customer Stories

A multinational mining company needed to transition the current operation of its service desk, with approximately 26,000 support tickets per month (40% voice and 60% portal contact channels), to a digital system. In addition to handling calls, this system needed to provide a seamless mechanism for agent management and analyzing metrics.

UAP delivered multi-channel capability with inbound and outbound voice calls and chat. The Agent Profile, Agent Management, and dashboard features allowed the contact center leads to manage the workload across all available agents and monitor real-time and historical performance metrics.

With UAP, the client was able to save approximately 2-3 minutes of information gathering on each call and improve resolution and turnaround time, freeing up service desk agents to focus on more complex issues.

UAP helped improve customer experience by engaging customers through their preferred channel, resulting in a 10% reduction in operating cost and a reduction in average call duration. The solution empowered agents to be more effective by focusing on more complex issues, and improved their performance by providing real-time KPIs and service-level matrices.

Conclusion

The goal of the Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG) is to help clients reimagine their customer sales and service using cloud agility and AI innovation to power revolutionary new customer experience.

AABG enables clients to enrich and unlock value from their customer interactions. We offer data and automation to connect customers in their channel of choice and deliver the right conversational experiences.

AABG enables proactive customer engagement through contact prevention and multi-day journey management, digitize the customer experience through customer channel of choice and automated self-service capabilities, and empower human interactions through behavioral pairing and AI-powered agent assist.

In this post, we introduced the Accenture Unified Agent Portal (UAP) solution that can transform customer service capabilities to improve customer experience and enable cost reductions. To learn more, reach out to the Accenture AWS Business Group.

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Accenture – AWS Partner Spotlight

Accenture is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that provides an end-to-end solution to migrate to and manage operations on AWS.

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