Citizens Advice Scales its Contact Center with Amazon Connect and Accenture

In 2022–2023, Citizens Advice helped over 2.66 million people in the UK seeking advice with urgent debt, benefits, and legal problems made more acute by the cost-of-living crisis. Over 12 months, the organization’s advisers dealt with 1.4 million calls to its national Adviceline phone service—its busiest channel. Although Citizens Advice has increased its remote advice capacity 10-times since 2010, impacts from developments such as the COVID-19 pandemic and unaffordable energy bills meant that call volumes continued to rise and people still struggled to reach the charity by phone.

Citizens Advice saw an opportunity at the outset of the pandemic to transform its call center to a full omnichannel contact center with phone, webchat, email, and video support. Its legacy telephony platform, which was approaching end of life, made innovation difficult and gave clients a poor queuing experience that cost the charity call fees for every minute a client waited on hold. “We were spending a high proportion of our investment on the cost of calls and, frankly, less on how we could innovate on the platform to improve the client experience,” says Kylie Havelock, director of product and platforms at Citizens Advice.

Citizens Advice wanted a contact center solution that could support continual improvement in line with its overall strategy. It also wanted to reduce calls costs, allocate funds to more advisers, and improve the queuing experience. “There’s lots of opportunity to do things better in queues,” says Havelock. “We have a high demand for our services that we are not fully able to meet. Automated callbacks retain a caller’s place in queue, so they don’t drop off the call and don’t have to listen to music. That’s a much better experience for them and better for us because we won’t pay for them to wait in the queue. It’s about getting to the right person as quickly as possible and creating a positive queuing experience.”

In May 2022, Citizens Advice selected Accenture to deploy Amazon Connect, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered contact center from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Accenture’s proposal met Citizens Advice’s requirement for an affordable, flexible, accessible, and interoperable contact center application. Amazon Connect could securely integrate with its existing case management and knowledge management systems. Also, the charity’s operational costs for Amazon Connect are based on advisers’ total usage of the application, offering large savings compared to a per-user model, because 63 percent of its advisers are part-time volunteers.

“Of all the providers we assessed, Accenture understood our needs the best,” says Havelock. “They listened to what we are, how we were set up, what our unique use cases were. It wasn’t a cookie-cutter proposal—it was based on us and what we needed.”

Havelock says the 7-month migration to Amazon Connect was “necessarily intense” because it integrated over a dozen Citizens Advice services, multiple local offices, thousands of users, and over 200 phone numbers. Moreover, the charity and Accenture faced a non-negotiable deadline to migrate to Amazon Connect due to the existing system’s approaching end of life.

“It was a huge endeavor, and we had the hardest of hard stops,” says Havelock. “We were the last customer left on that legacy platform, so there was really nowhere to go if we missed that deadline. We just had to work relentlessly back from that date and be extremely tight on scope.”

Accenture worked with Citizens Advice to deliver a stable omnichannel contact center with Amazon Connect that supported the almost 250 member charities by the cutoff date and went live in May 2023. The charity often hires from the same demographics that it helps and many of those people need assistive technology at work, in particular screen readers. So Accenture enhanced Amazon Connect with the Accenture Unified Agent Portal (UAP), a customized user interface that helps Citizens Advice improve its internal applications’ compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1 AA) standard.

After migrating to Amazon Connect, Citizens Advice’s first major improvements involved enhancing the usability of the Accenture UAP and adding near real-time and historical reporting on call performance metrics—such as call duration, number of calls answered, and the turnaround time on calls—that it must report to key funders.

With Amazon Connect and Accenture UAP, Citizens Advice has gained high-impact quick wins, with vastly improved support ticketing and more secure authentication to Amazon Connect that has eliminated the head office burden of managing password reset requests.

“Amazon Connect with UAP performs well and has never gone down,” says Havelock. “The ticketing process allows us to identify common issues and we can quickly provide call logs and records to be investigated.”

Citizens Advice used to get many tickets a day from users who needed to reset forgotten passwords on the legacy system. The new sign-in process is linked to standard two-factor authentication, so signing in to Amazon Connect also signs users into its case management and knowledge management systems. This means a 100 percent reduction in support requests for password resets. “It’s not only more secure, but our support overheads are much, much lower for password reset tickets,” says Havelock.

Citizens Advice also has a reliable platform to roll out omnichannel support capabilities and develop AI-enhanced innovations in the future. It can now support email, webchat, messaging, and video channels with Amazon Connect to support its phone operations. The charity is evaluating AI-powered contact center analytics and quality management available with Amazon Connect Contact Lens and generative AI opportunities for near-real-time agent assistance with Amazon Q in Connect.

“Innovations we’re able to look at now include automated transcripts of calls, which could save a lot of time for our advisers in case write-ups,” says Havelock. “We can also do thematic analysis of what people are calling us about.”

Citizens Advice, a registered UK charity since 1939, provides confidential and impartial advice online, over the phone, and in person to millions of people each year. Its mission is to ensure that no one faces complicated problems without good-quality, independent advice. Advisers and volunteers with Citizens Advice and its network of member charities provide advice to anyone in the UK seeking help with life matters, including benefits, work, housing, debt, law, immigration, and consumer issues.