Modernizing the citizen experience with Amazon Connect: AI-powered interactions to build trust and drive mission outcomes

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) announced a commitment to accelerate GSA’s OneGov Strategy by providing up to $1 billion in savings. Civilian agencies can use the program through December 31, 2028, to support their contact center migration and modernization journey to Amazon Connect.

Government agencies struggle to modernize citizen experiences while optimizing resources, reducing costs, and enhancing security. Siloed systems, untenable volumes, reduced staff, and manual workflows create an urgent need to modernize the citizen experience and drive efficiencies by using generative AI, agentic AI, automation, and analytics—while paying only for what you use.

Amazon Connect—the AWS AI-powered, comprehensive contact center as a service (CCaaS) application—transforms government contact centers of all sizes into modern, efficient, and secure service delivery hubs providing enhanced experiences. Amazon Connect is available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and is Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorized. For more details, visit AWS savings program for U.S. federal government agencies.

Reshaping the citizen experience using Amazon Connect

The built-in AI capabilities of Amazon Connect revolutionize federal contact centers, help desks, and citizen engagement through seamless omnichannel experiences. Amazon Connect provides forecasting and workforce management features, personalized self-service across voice, chat, digital channels, and comprehensive quality and workforce management tools. Agencies can enable outbound campaigns with proactive outreach capabilities and intelligent insights. This allows human agents to focus on complex, high-value interactions while using the real-time assistance and contextual guidance of Amazon Q in Connect to deliver efficient, empathetic service that builds trust.

Amazon Connect provides a flexible, scalable, and secure platform for government agencies aiming to modernize citizen and stakeholder services while continually optimizing using insights and innovation. Facing an unplanned contractor change, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) rapidly migrated its legacy, on-premises call centers to Amazon Connect in 10 days, reducing operational costs, improving efficiency, enhancing analytics, and achieving better integration with mission-critical tools.

Differentiated benefits drive mission outcomes

Agencies choose Amazon Connect to achieve several outcomes that can benefit their mission. Enhancing citizen experience is a primary objective, and using Amazon Connect achieves this by providing intelligent self-service resulting in an empowered workforce. AI-powered, multilingual self-service features such as chat-based assistants and virtual assistants can handle routine tasks, reduce dependency on human agents, and free up staff hours with real-time assistance tools that decrease training time, help provide consistent service, and boost first-call resolution.

Government agencies can transform and consolidate operations through scalable cloud architecture, which means they can move away from sprawling integrations that create technical debt and require disparate vendor contracts. Through pay-as-you-go pricing and scalable architecture, agencies can meet fluctuating demand and eliminate hardware costs and inflexible agent license requirements. Seeking a simplified, modern, and scalable solution capable of handling seasonal fluctuations, the Wisconsin Department of Revenue (DOR) migrated its contact center to Amazon Connect in just four months, cutting technology costs by 66 percent, eliminating outages, and reducing Customer Service Bureau hold times by 60 percent. Generative AI features streamline case management and provide valuable insights simplifying decision-making, resource allocation, and forecasting.

With Amazon Connect, agencies can innovate while demonstrating immediate return on investment (ROI) by integrating seamlessly with existing systems and managing deployments at their own pace. Amazon Connect enables agile experimentation, and customers automatically benefit from continuous improvements in AI models, training methodologies, and new agentic capabilities without upgrades or migrations. Using the data and insights about customer interactions that Amazon Connect collects, organizations architect compelling experiences, reduce cost-to-serve, and improve productivity while solving current and emerging needs. For example, Amazon Connect paired with intelligent document processing (IDP) can reduce manual back office processing.

More than 40 Washington, DC agencies—including the Department of Health, Department of Human Services, and Child Support Services—moved to Amazon Connect because it’s fast to implement, user-friendly, and more cost-effective than legacy solutions. By using the straightforward features of Amazon Connect, these agencies modernized and standardized their contact center operations across departments while providing better service to citizens through multiple channels, including voice, SMS, and chat. For example, Child Support Services immediately saved over $1 million in upgrade costs and eliminated $75,000 in annual maintenance costs.

Agencies are finding they can meet evolving customer expectations by offering faster, easier, and more personalized service across interactive voice response (IVR), chat, third-party messaging applications, and web calling using unified configurations and analytics. They build citizen trust with proactive outreach that reduces inbound contact volumes, enabling human agents to deliver differentiated citizen experiences faster and more efficiently.

For improved security, agencies can protect against unauthorized access and reduce fraud and waste using machine models that detect suspicious behavior and immediately revoke access.

The path ahead

As government agencies face mounting pressure to modernize citizen services while optimizing resources, Amazon Connect offers a proven path forward with comprehensive AI capabilities, flexible architecture, AWS GovCloud (US) availability, and FedRAMP authorization—now more accessible through the AWS General Services Administration (GSA) OneGov program.

Ready to transform your agency’s citizen experience? Contact us to learn how Amazon Connect can help you deliver exceptional, personalized service while driving mission outcomes.