In today’s world, sustainability has become a critical concern for businesses across all industries. As we grapple with the challenges of climate change and diminishing natural resources, it’s imperative that organizations take proactive steps to reduce their environmental impact.

By reducing waste, minimizing our ecological footprint, and shifting to renewable energy, we can promote sustainability – a goal that touches every person and business, emphasizing the need for collective action to achieve a more sustainable future.

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing has gained momentum as more investors seek not only financial returns but also to contribute to positive societal outcomes. This trend reflects a growing belief that more sustainable, responsible business practices are linked to a company’s overall performance and risk profile.

Contact centers, in particular, often have large carbon footprints due to their energy consumption that power dedicated servers to host databases and call center software, contact center telephony, as well as agents’ workstations and the buildings where agents are located. Consequently, companies that implement ESG criteria, more sustainable and responsible business practices, when selecting their contact center solution, can gain long-term benefits and improve firm reputation.

In this blog, we will discuss the sustainability best practices for building a contact center operation using Amazon Connect, a fully managed cloud-based contact center service by Amazon Web Services (AWS). We will describe how, by leveraging the cloud, optimizing resource utilization, and aligning with sustainability efforts of AWS, organizations can help reduce the environmental impact of their contact center operations.

Traditional contact centers

Traditional contact center architecture typically consists of contact center telephony (Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)) and contact center systems such as Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Call Management System (CMS), Voice Recording (VR), and Campaign Manager (CM), all of which are running in data centers. Additionally, there are agents’ and supervisors’ workplaces, equipped with workstations and telephone lines.

Data centers that host contact center databases and systems, generate carbon emissions due to their energy consumption to power dedicated servers, cooling, infrastructure and other activities associated with data center operations. Contact center telephony systems, including Private Branch Exchange (PBX) or IP-PBX systems for making and receiving phone calls, also generate carbon emissions due to their energy consumption. Analog PBX systems typically use more energy due to the need for physical hardware and copper wiring, with energy usage ranging from 100W to 500W, depending on the size and complexity of the setup. Digital and IP-PBX Systems are more energy-efficient, with energy usage ranging between 50W and 200W.

Furthermore, contact centers typically provide each agent with a dedicated desktop computer and monitor to handle customer interactions. According to Journal of Corporate Real Estate, Govil, M., & Panda, M. (2013). Sustainable Contact Centers: Strategies for reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions, desktop PCs can consume between 60 and 250 watts of power, while monitors can increase the power consumption of workstations by 30% to 50%.

The World Economic Forum found that 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions come from buildings, which includes facilities like contact centers. Additionally, employee commuting to centralized call centers adds to traffic congestion, carbon emissions, and air pollution.

Amazon Connect: A more sustainable cloud contact center solution

In contrast to traditional contact centers that run in on-premise data centers, Amazon Connect is a fully managed cloud contact center service by AWS. Amazon Connect workloads can be separated into the following layers: Telephony, Amazon Connect interface/API, Contact Flows/Interactive Voice Response (IVR), agent workstation, and metrics & reporting and they correspond to the contact center applications such as Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), Interactive Voice Response (IVR) in the traditional contact centers.

There are multiple components of the Amazon Connect architecture which allow for reduction of carbon emissions.

1. As a managed cloud service running on the global infrastructure of AWS, Amazon Connect fully leverages AWS cloud sustainability benefits.
2. Amazon Connect provides managed telephony services running on the same efficient infrastructure. This eliminates need for Private Branch Exchange (PBX) or IP-PBX systems for making and receiving phone calls along with their corresponding carbon emissions.
3. WebRTC calling reduces hardware contact center requirements, as there is no need for a PBX system or dedicated agent workstations.
4. The browser-based agent workstation allows agents to work from home instead of being concentrated in contact center offices
5. There is no need for agents to travel to the contact center offices, which reduces transport carbon emissions. According to Our World Data, road transportation including cars and buses contributes 45.1% of global transport carbon emissions.

Efficient infrastructure and renewable energy

The infrastructure scale of AWS allows for higher resource utilization and energy efficiency than the typical on-premises data center. A recent report, “Moving Onto the AWS Cloud Reduces Carbon Emissions,” estimates that AWS’s infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more efficient than on-premises, and when workloads are optimized on AWS, the associated carbon footprint can be reduced by up to 99%.

AWS is continuously innovating in cooling efficiency, using different cooling techniques depending on the time of year and utilizing real-time sensor data to adapt to changing weather conditions. In 2019, Amazon (including AWS) set an ambitious goal to match 100% of the electricity it consumes with renewable energy by 2030. Amazon achieved this goal in 2023, seven years early, with 100% of the electricity consumed by Amazon matched with renewable energy sources.

Artificial intelligence and more sustainable computing

As found by Moving onto the AWS Cloud Reduces Carbon Emissions, artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming how we use technology to address some of the world’s biggest challenges. As we scale our use of AI, it’s crucial to work toward minimizing its environmental footprint. A study commissioned by AWS and conducted by Accenture shows that an effective way to reduce the carbon footprint of AI workloads is by moving them from on-premises infrastructure to AWS data centers around the globe.

Amazon Connect embeds AI into every step of the interaction with customer – to recognize the customer using their voice, to understand what customer is calling about, to serve the customer by AI instead of by a live agent or to analyze the customer conversations, find out about customer issues and recognize customer feelings. Amazon Connect embeds generative AI capabilities into customer interactions, such as Contact Lens for real-time call analysis and post-contact summaries or Amazon Q in Connect as a generative AI agent assist.

When it comes to running these complex AI and especially generative AI workloads, AWS offers a wide selection of hardware. To optimize performance and energy consumption, we developed purpose-built silicon like AWS Inferentia2, which is up to 50% more energy-efficient than comparable Elastic Cloud Compute instances. As AWS continues to invest in more efficient hardware for AI, Amazon Connect customers automatically benefit from efficiency gains without any effort on their part.

Best practices for sustainability in the cloud

In addition to leveraging the cloud sustainability benefits of Amazon Connect, organizations can optimize their Amazon Connect-based contact center architecture for maximum sustainability benefits. The AWS Well-Architected Framework’s sustainability pillar focuses on six key areas for optimization: contact center placement in the region, alignment to user behavior, software & architecture, data, hardware & services, and development & deployment process. Following best practices in these key areas allows contact centers to help minimize their cloud footprint by reducing resource waste, maximizing utilization rates, and optimizing the total components deployed to support operations.

Steer work to more sustainable regions

For Amazon Connect deployments, organizations should choose a region based on both business priorities and sustainability goals. Shortlist potential regions based on business priorities, compliance, latency, cost, customer & agents location and service availability.

The AWS blog post “How to Select a Region for Your Workload Based on Sustainability Goals” describes how to use market-based and location-based methods to select appropriate AWS Regions for Amazon Connect. The market-based method involves choosing regions near Amazon renewable energy projects, while the location-based method involves choosing regions where the grid has a lower published carbon intensity.

Alignment to User Behavior

This sustainability best practice is about optimizing the resources used for the activities performed. The resources used need to scale up and down with users’ demand.

With Amazon Connect, once users call or otherwise interact with the contact center, Amazon Connect will scale up or down based on demand, avoiding over-provisioning.

In addition, customers can optimize the typical cloud contact center architecture based on Amazon Connect, to align with their contact center needs.

1. At design time, remove any services that are not required for the customer contact center solution, resulting in fewer services running and less energy consumed. For example, if the solution does not need text-to-speech functionality, Amazon Polly can be excluded, eliminating the energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with this service. In addition, if the solution does not include the outbound campaigns, Amazon Pinpoint can be excluded from the architecture in design time. The same stands for Amazon Simple Email Services, if email is not required.
2. Within Amazon Connect itself, optional features like Cases, Tasks, Contact Lens, Forecasting, Capacity Planning, and Scheduling will not be enabled if they are not required in the customer’s solution. If a feature is not activated, it will not run, use energy, or generate carbon emissions
3. Key components of Amazon Connect contact center architecture use AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service. AWS Lambda functions only run when triggered, avoiding idle resources. As per the architecture diagram above, the service leverages other serverless technologies like Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Lex for event-driven architectures that optimize efficiency.

AWS Lambda supports sustainability by allocating a central processing unit (CPU) power, network bandwidth, and disk input or output that are proportional to the amount of memory allocated to functions. It invokes code only when needed and automatically scales to support the rate of incoming requests. This helps you effectively optimize and minimize your workload’s environmental impact.

Data

Amazon Connect recently announced the general availability of analytics data lake, a Zero ETL analytics capability eliminating the need to build and maintain complex data pipelines. With the analytics data lake, records are de-duplicated so less data need to be stored, and less resources need to be used.

AWS provides tools and guidance that enable customers to modernize their data management strategies. This includes keeping separate active “hot” data from inactive “cold” data sets using AWS’s fully managed storage services. Additionally, AWS helps customers optimize their data replication processes by reducing replication size and throughput requirements, leading to decreased energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Summary comparison: Traditional contact centers vs. Amazon Connect

Conclusion

In summary, we discussed best sustainability practices and demonstrated how customers can build Amazon Connect cloud-based contact centers that can reduce their carbon footprint. The combination of managed infrastructure, optimized hardware, serverless technologies and renewable power provides a more sustainable foundation for delivering exceptional customer experiences with a lower carbon footprint, now and into the future, resulting in a more sustainable customer experience.

Calls to action:

• Assess your contact center’s carbon footprint and explore how the cloud and Amazon Connect can help reduce it.
• Migrate your contact center to Amazon Connect, which could reduce your workload carbon footprint by up to 99% when workloads are optimized on AWS
• Architect your Amazon Connect deployment for sustainability. Follow the best practice recommendations for workload placement, alignment to user behavior, serverless architectures, data and utilization.
• Engage with AWS and the Amazon Connect team to further discuss how you can build a more sustainable contact center solution that better aligns with your organization’s environmental goals.

By following these actionable steps, you can transform your contact center into a more sustainable, energy efficient, and environmentally-friendly operation.

Ready to transform your customer service experience with Amazon Connect? Contact us.

Authors

 Nada Reinprecht is an AWS Senior Solution Architect passionate about creating innovative technology solutions across industries that solve complex business challenges for our customers. Before AWS she worked with Accenture, IBM and others within Industry designing and delivering solutions for customers in Australia, US, Europe and UK. Nada loves bush walking, yoga and running.

 Mike Cairns is a Senior Solution Architect for AWS with experience designing and implementing innovative cloud-based solutions to solve complex business challenges across diverse range of industries. He leverages his deep technical expertise in AWS services to help organizations modernize their infrastructure, improve operational efficiency, and unlock new business capabilities.