Capita chooses Amazon Connect Customer voice agents to better serve 1.6 million UK residents

Capita is a leading provider of customer experience services for UK public sector organizations and the UK’s first AI enabled Business Process Outsourcer (BPO). Every year, Capita helps a large local council support contacts from 1.6 million residents seeking support for essential services, such as highway maintenance to social care and waste management.

The limitations of traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems have typically driven these residents toward human agent-assisted channels even for routine inquiries. This creates unnecessary demand on human agents and extends wait times during peak periods. To future-proof its service delivery and revolutionize how they serve customers, Capita initiated a bold modernization effort centered on Amazon Connect Customer AI voice agents, aiming to deliver an efficient and effective customer experience using conversational AI.

Why Capita chose Connect Customer AI voice agents

Connect Customer’s native offering of AI voice agents appealed to Capita. Orchestrating speech recognition, large language model (LLM), and text-to-speech (TTS) through fragmented services from separate vendors would have created operational challenges for their team. Instead, Connect Customer offered a unified solution with all the necessary technology included, significantly reducing implementation times, architectural complexity, and latency.

“The ability to understand not just what a resident says but how they say it, understanding tone and sentiment, is critical for a public sector environment where callers can be vulnerable or distressed,” said Nikki Powell, Director of Citizen Contact Service Delivery at Capita PLC. “Connect Customer AI voice agents demonstrate the immense potential for agentic AI in customer experience, while offering a simple process for set up and deployment.”

Connect Customer AI voice agents retain all data within AWS services, simplifying data residency and security considerations, which are essential for UK public sector clients handling sensitive resident information.

Implementation and testing

Capita is currently in a testing phase, evaluating voice agents within its Connect Customer environment. The integration was straightforward given Connect Customer’s native voice agent capabilities, allowing the team to move from concept to a working test environment rapidly.

“We are using the built-in simulation and observability tooling to validate agent behavior across a range of resident interaction scenarios before our live deployment,” said Nikki.

This thoughtful, phased approach reflects Capita’s ‘People, empowered’ philosophy, which sees AI as an augmentation to human capabilities rather than a replacement. Capita aims to supercharge employees in a complementary human-AI partnership to maximize outcomes for their customers.

Expected transformation: from frustration to satisfaction

Capita anticipates Connect Customer AI voice agents will significantly improve how they serve customers:

• Up to 95% automation for routine inquiries
• 35% increase in agent productivity as staff are freed up to focus on complex cases
• Improvements in customer satisfaction scores through instant, around the clock support availability

Following successful testing, Capita plans to progressively roll out Connect Customer AI voice agents across the highest-volume service lines. The team is also exploring how Connect Customer’s multilingual capabilities could support the council’s diverse resident base, a critical consideration for UK authorities serving multicultural communities.

Rethinking the future of public sector service delivery

While Capita is early in their journey, they are taking a thoughtful approach to where they can insert agentic AI to improve the experience of the residents. The shift from traditional IVR to agentic AI represents more than a technology upgrade, it’s a fundamental rethinking of how councils can serve their residents with empathy, efficiency, and accessibility.

As Connect Customer AI voice agents continue to evolve, Capita is positioned to deliver consistent around the clock self-service for council services while ensuring human agents are available when residents need them most. For the 1.6 million residents Capita serves annually, this transformation promises faster resolutions, more natural interactions, and ultimately, a better experience when engaging with their local government.

Learn more about agentic AI-powered customer experience, or discover how Amazon Connect Customer is transforming public sector customer experience through conversational AI.