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.