AWS Public Sector Blog

Kyndryl helps Arizona MVD transform customer experience with Amazon Connect

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The motto of the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division (MVD) is “Out of the line and safely on the road.” Within the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT), MVD employs more than 600 customer service representatives in 44 offices across the state to help meet residents’ needs and get them on the road with ease. Demonstrating its commitment to putting customers first, MVD wants to deliver fast, efficient, and friendly customer service by reducing call wait time.

With the help of Kyndryl and Amazon Web Services (AWS), MVD migrated its business service desk into Amazon Connect to improve customer service, increase efficiency, and save costs. The success of this project has aided in the development of new opportunities for MVD as it continues innovating and enhancing services to better serve the people of Arizona.

Innovating for MVD communications

MVD wanted to expand what could be done with the Kyndryl service desk. Previously, the service desk used an outdated telephony system, expensive interactive voice response (IVR) software, and ran in an on-premises data center. This made it difficult for MVD to support increasing customer requirements and introduce new applications. MVD wanted a solution that would better support expansion to 24/7 call operations, new support functions for digital driver’s license enrollment, and integrate reporting and analytics. Plus, they needed a system that could scale up during peak demands without worrying about infrastructure resiliency.

“A cloud-first strategy allows us to spin up the right resources that we need in the moment that we need them,” said Eric Jorgensen, director of the MVD.

To address these challenges, Kyndryl, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner was chosen to help transform the MVD service desk. Kyndryl, which has more than 24 years of experience as a managed service provider for ADOT, developed a solution to address the agency’s needs.

Powering MVD’s digital transformation with AWS

Kyndryl’s solution utilizes Amazon Connect, a cloud-based contact center platform, to enable MVD to leverage “flex agents.” Flex agents refer to in-office call center staff that can assist customers over the phone when needed, but can also handle other non-call-center tasks such as documentation and filing reports during slower periods. Specifically, the pay-as-you-go pricing model of Amazon Connect was a better value for MVD needs compared to traditional contact center platforms that require fixed per seat licensing fees. Additionally, the ability to only pay for actual usage rather than over-provisioning capacity for peak periods provides increased scalability. The MVD contact center can scale up during seasonal peaks when call volumes rise, and scale back down during slower periods. This level of elasticity matches costs closely to actual usage patterns and avoids limitations on minimum seats.

The solution incorporates contact flows in Amazon Connect to provide human-like dynamic IVR to gather appropriate personal information. This customizes the customer experience, validates gathered information with persistent data store in real time using AWS Lambda, and facilitates automatic registration renewal transactions.

The solution also uses Amazon Connect Contact Lens and Amazon Connect Customer Profiles for analytics and quality management of MVD’s Mobile ID support center and its business service desk. Supervisors and call center agents can get real-time alerts on escalations, call recordings along with transcripts and sentiment analysis, and a more unified view of customer profile information such as account type, billing or shipping address, and all associated cases with comments.

Using Kyndryl’s AWS-powered solution, MVD now has a virtualized call center on AWS, eliminating dependencies on physical call centers and providing improved availability, scalability, and agility to support MVD’s growing customer requirements. This has helped MVD provide a more robust customer experience, including the ability to offer new services through this support center such as 24/7 hours, support for enrollment in the new state digital drivers license, and automated vehicle registration renewal using IVR.

By moving to Amazon Connect and its pricing model, MVD reduced its hardware and software costs as well as the costs associated with maintaining an on-premises data center and telecommunications equipment.

“State and local government agencies in the US are focused on continuously enhancing digital access and in-person experiences for both citizens and employees by meeting people where they are. This is the promise of a better government and what I am most excited about co-creating with my customers on the vision for safer, faster, and frictionless services,” said Brian Shell, senior partner at Kyndryl.

Conclusion and next steps

Kyndryl’s omnichannel Amazon Connect solution has helped MVD achieve its goals of transforming customer experience, expanding hours, and reducing average call wait times and speed to resolution. This has lowered MVD’s costs and improved efficiency. MVD now has a reliable and cost-effective solution to help it continue providing essential services to the people of Arizona.

Kyndryl is an IT infrastructure services provider that designs, builds, manages, and modernizes complex, mission-critical information systems. Learn more about Kyndryl and explore their solutions in the AWS Marketplace.

To learn more about how AWS can support your organization’s modernization efforts with Amazon Connect, reach out to our team.

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Kishore Kumar Balasundaram

Kishore Kumar Balasundaram

Kishore is a senior solutions architect for Amazon Web Services' (AWS) worldwide public sector. His passion is helping customers design and implement modern cloud-based architectures that align with organizational goals.

Brian Shell

Brian Shell

Brian is a senior partner for the State of Arizona and DMV industry at Kyndryl. He has worked with Kyndryl’s public sector customers and partners for more than a decade, helping bring consulting and managed services for modern cloud-based solutions to healthcare and government.

DJ Kulkarni

DJ Kulkarni

DJ is a contact center specialist solutions architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS). He works closely with global system integrator (GSI) partners and customers to build CX on cloud solutions on AWS. DJ has more than two decades of industry experience building enterprise contact centers.