Capitec elevates experiences with Amazon Connect

Combating fraud and building customer trust

For over 20 years, Capitec has been providing simple and affordable banking services to millions of South Africans. As a truly customer-obsessed organization, they recognized the need to modernize their aging contact center infrastructure that was limiting their ability to innovate and deliver the customer experiences they wanted. Using Amazon Connect and generative AI capabilities with services like Amazon Bedrock, they have been able to build trust with their customers and drive the vision of their customer-centric future.

The contact center challenges

Like many banks that rely on complex on-premises telephony systems, Capitec’s previous contact center operations were built on disparate servers spread across multiple data centers. This created several operational hurdles. Managing and maintaining 198 different servers consumed 90% of IT efforts, leaving little room for innovation. The old perpetual licensing model also made it cost prohibitive to scale up. Most critically, the outdated systems could not integrate with Capitec’s modern banking platform, preventing seamless real-time issue resolution for customers.

Capitec realized a fundamental change was needed to put customers at the center of their business and provide the banking experience their customers demand.

Capitec chose Amazon Connect to power their customer experience transformation. The solution’s virtually unlimited scalability, seamless integration capabilities via robust APIs, and advanced AI/ML services were perfect for Capitec’s needs.

“Amazon Connect has a vast integration ability – it can talk to everyone and everything,” said Etienne Botha, Software Development Manager at Capitec.

Building customer trust

One of Capitec’s key priorities as part of this transformation was combating the rising social engineering fraud targeting South African banking customers. Capitec wanted to be able to reach out to their customers based on previous inquiries, but often, those outbound calls over the traditional phone network were going unanswered. Customers didn’t trust inbound phone calls, even if initiated in response to their requests, because there was often an extended delay between the initial request and the call, making them suspect fraud.

Leveraging the flexibility of Amazon Connect, they built a new innovative feature within the Capitec mobile application. On the customer’s mobile device, they send an automated real-time notification to the customer within the Capitec application before a legitimate call that was initiated from a customer request. This notification enables the customer to expect a call from a validated agent after a predetermined time, eliminating the suspicion of fraud.

“This feature is crucial for building trust,” stated Botha. Within 6 months, this new feature in Amazon Connect helped validate over 5 million legitimate calls, a major win against fraudsters.

A number of Capitec business units are now able to reach out to customers through this validated experience in a way that builds trust. Additionally, because of this workflow, Capitec is able to optimize their workforce by ensuring that the most suitable agent is assigned to each customer case at the appropriate time.

Relentlessly improving experiences

Beyond fraud prevention, Capitec has embraced AI capabilities to continuously improve customer service, including using Amazon Connect Contact Lens and Amazon Bedrock to analyze 100% of conversations. This was a major leap from their previous 1% analysis using manual review.

Capitec uses Amazon Connect Contact Lens to monitor sentiment and a transcription from the customer call. The Amazon Connect transcripts are streamed into generative AI models in Amazon Bedrock that specifies a grade for the transaction based on the rules of each business unit. For example, Capitec was able to immediately detect a defective ATM machine from a few reports about incorrect cash dispensed. These insights are generated within 7 minutes of a call taking place and enables Capitec to learn in near real-time from the outcomes of calls and dynamically improve operations and customer experience.

“This real-time technology offers a massive competitive advantage,” said Sashen Naidoo, Software Engineer at Capitec. “One which wasn’t possible with [previous telephony] solutions.”

Whether it’s identifying a defective ATM machine or just finding better solutions for customers, Capitec can now react and respond faster. In addition, Amazon Connect and Amazon Bedrock analyzing 100% of calls enabled Capitec to realize significant efficiencies by being able to redeploy QA Specialists that were previously taking care of the manual quality assurance.

Communicating inclusively across channels

Capitec is also now able to support a number of additional channels based on the customer’s need, and can even enable customers to seamlessly move between a phone call to a text mid-interaction.

“We are moving into the 21st century. We are assisting our clients, how they want to be assisted when they want to be assisted,“ said Botha. “We know why they’re calling us. They trust us.“

One of the key features Capitec highlighted at AWS Africa Summit, was a new- in-app calling feature poised to bring the accessibility of personalized banking to all of the bank’s 12 million app-using customers. This will enable customers to call over wifi, even without a mobile plan.

By transforming IT operations with a move to Amazon Connect, Capitec has unleashed a new paradigm of innovation and trust in the financial services industry.

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