AWS Contact Center

Evolving Customer Experience at Avis Budget Group with Amazon Connect Customer

by Cole Martin, Paras Babbar, and Sabari Sivaprakasm on Permalink Share

Avis Budget Group, a leading global provider of mobility solutions, took a practical approach to evolving its customer experience with Amazon Connect Customer, building a scalable foundation for thoughtful, human-centered use of AI that helps its teams resolve customer needs more quickly and efficiently.

Benefits:

  • Faster answers for routine requests — AI-powered self-service is being tested for straightforward requests such as confirming booking details, with a team member available when customers need one
  • Foundation for modernization with always-on reliability — Replaced a patchwork of legacy call flows with a unified, reliable platform that supports careful testing and responsible adoption of new AI capabilities
  • A better experience for our customer care teams — Real-time customer context is delivered to team members in a unified workspace, so they spend less time searching and more time helping customers
  • Fewer inter-department transfers — Smarter routing and unified customer context have reduced transfers between teams, helping connect customers to the right person sooner

Overview

Avis Budget Group operates brands such as Avis, Budget, Payless, and Zipcar across 180 countries and more than 10,000 locations globally. After more than 80 years in business, the company recognized that its customer experience systems, shaped by decades of growth and including hundreds of call flows built over time, needed a modern, unified foundation to keep delivering reliable service and to support future innovation, including the responsible use of AI.

To modernize its customer experience for the future, Avis Budget Group turned to Amazon Connect Customer. It started with a phased migration of its existing flows and team member experience, completing the move in just over a year. By taking a deliberate “migrate first, modernize second” approach, the team avoided compounding risk and established a modular, AI-ready architecture.

Today, Avis Budget Group is building on the foundation it created to introduce AI purposefully, in ways that support customers and customer care teams.

Opportunity | Building a modern, unified foundation for better customer care
For Avis Budget Group, customer experience is foundational to its success. “Our customers count on us at important moments in their travel, so reliability and ease matter most,” says Sabari Sivaprakasam, Engineering Manager at Avis Budget Group.

As the business grew, the company saw an opportunity to simplify and strengthen its customer care technology:

  • Simplifying hundreds of call flows built over many years with varying logic
  • Giving engineers more time to focus on innovation
  • Supporting seasonal peaks and global expansion with greater ease
  • Strengthening reliability so customers can count on a consistent experience

The team recognized that modernizing responsibly required more than adding new technology to existing infrastructure; it required rethinking the foundation.

A phased journey from migration to AI-powered experiences

Avis Budget Group took a structured, “migrate first, modernize second” approach, first establishing reliability and then thoughtfully adding AI capabilities that support its teams and customers.

Phase 1: Migration

Avis Budget Group started by migrating all existing contact flows to Amazon Connect Customer, including its AI-powered interactive voice response (IVR) phone system, which understands natural speech, before expanding globally. The migration took just over a year and was designed for minimal service interruptions.

“By the end of the migration we had a stable, globally deployed platform with clear visibility into performance. That gave us a dependable base for improving how we serve our customers,” said Sabari.

Phase 2: Modernization

With the foundation in place, Avis Budget Group began building on its customer experience, introducing AI where it can improve the experience for both customers and team members.

  • Conversational analytics — AI-powered analysis of customer feedback and trends helps Avis Budget Group better understand customer needs and improve the customer experience.
  • Real-time customer context for our customer care teams — Team members are automatically provided with customer reservation, loyalty, and account data upon connection, reducing time-to-context and enabling faster, more personalized service. Better routing accuracy and shared context have also helped reduce inter-department transfers, helping customers reach the right team sooner.

The Avis Budget Group team is expanding these capabilities, while methodically testing AI for use cases such as self-service and support for customer care teams:

  • AI-powered self-service — Connect Customer AI voice assistants for sales and service options, giving customers a convenient way to get quick help with everyday needs, such as confirming a booking, with a team member available when they need one.
  • AI voice assistants for smarter routing — Exploring speech-based capabilities that understand customer intent and help route calls to the right team with greater accuracy and speed, without disrupting the existing care team workspace structure.
  • AI assistance for customer care teams — Evaluating tools that surface relevant articles and policy details to customer care team members during active calls, helping them find answers faster.
    Automated post-call surveys and AI-supported quality reviews — Reducing after-call work for team members and helping managers review service quality more efficiently.

“AI requires earned trust,” says Sabari. “We start where the technology can assist our customers and our teams in clear, practical ways that build customer confidence, and we grow from there with intention. That is our model.”

A reliable global platform ready to evolve with customers’ needs

Avis Budget Group now operates entirely on Amazon Connect Customer, with a foundation built to evolve thoughtfully over time. That foundation gives the company the flexibility to keep improving the experience as customers’ needs change.

The company’s journey demonstrates a simple principle: thoughtful AI adoption in customer experience works best when it pairs modern technology with human judgment. By migrating first and modernizing thoughtfully, Avis Budget Group is working to resolve customer needs more quickly and deliver more personalized service for the millions of customers who rely on the company every day.

Learn more about how Amazon Connect Customer is helping enterprises deliver AI-powered customer experiences through self-service, conversational analytics, and additional tools that support customer care teams.

About the authors

Sabarikanth Sivaprakasam currently serves as Engineering Manager at Avis Budget Group, where he focuses on modernizing contact center platforms and improving customer engagement at global scale. Sabari has been closely involved in Avis Budget Group’s Amazon Connect Customer journey, including cloud contact center migration, conversational self-service, global rollout, IVR simplification, and emerging AI capabilities. His work centers on creating practical, scalable solutions that improve both customer and agent experiences while simplifying operational complexity. He is passionate about applying cloud and AI technologies in ways that create measurable business value and better service experiences for customers.

Paras Babbar is an AWS Enterprise Support Lead and Connect specialist, excels in guiding customers to create robust and efficient cloud solutions. He specializes in revolutionizing contact centers and tackling complex business challenges, consistently delivering innovative strategies that propel customer success. When he’s not in the cloud, you’ll find him on the cricket field or on the pickleball court rallying it out with his wife.

Cole Martin is a Product Marketing Manager for Amazon Connect Customer at AWS. He helps shape how the market understands Connect Customer’s AI-powered capabilities: from agentic self-service to end-to-end automation. He works closely with global enterprises to champion their success stories, bringing AI-powered customer experience transformation to the spotlight.