Five Star Call Centers Drops Call Times by 25% with Local Measure and Amazon Connect

Five Star Call Centers, a business process outsourcer (BPO), provides inbound technical support and customer service for clients across the United States, Mexico, and Guatemala. With approximately 1,000 agents across multiple locations, the company needed a telephony solution that would improve the agent and end-customer experience. Working with AWS Partner Local Measure brought Five Star Call Centers omnichannel capabilities and provided agents with a single pane of glass to view relevant data and workflows for one of their clients. Implementing Engage for Amazon Connect helped reduce average call handling and management times by 25 percent and opened the door to further modernization for this client.

Agents at Five Star Call Centers needed to master multiple applications which led to inefficiencies. The call center environment used multiple phone systems and lacked voicemail, callbacks, and working recordings. There was no integration with their key customer relationship management (CRM) tool—Salesforce—so agents were also missing valuable customer context on calls. From a management perspective, onboarding agents was a slow process and even routine tasks like scheduling, forecasting, and capacity planning posed challenges because of limited visibility into agent workloads.

With a mandate to increase the pace of innovation, improve onboarding and training, and increase overall efficiency, Five Star Call Centers turned to AWS Partner Local Measure. In just two months, Five Star Call Centers migrated to Local Measure’s Engage for Amazon Connect and experienced zero downtime during the implementation. Engage is a pre-built contact center platform powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), that offers simple and streamlined customer service. Built for Amazon Connect, Engage provides an intuitive interface to manage all inbound and outbound customer queries, ensuring exceptional customer experiences.

The Engage platform offers seamless integrations with several AWS-native contact center enablement functions. For instance, AWS Cognito offers easy customer identity and access management. Amazon Pinpoint enables multichannel customer communications while Amazon Connect Customer Profiles works in tandem to create a unified customer profile by aggregating customer data from third-party applications. Amazon Q in Connect reduces the research time and burden for agents by offering real-time recommendations from a connected knowledge source, like Salesforce, helping contact center agents resolve customer issues quickly and accurately, and Amazon QuickSight embeds unified business intelligence into the platform for easy access to insights.

This rich functionality has helped Engage for Amazon Connect to deliver a streamlined agent desktop that has enabled a 75 percent drop in onboarding times.

Since Engage was implemented, Local Measure has delivered time savings on several fronts. According to Mike Zerfas, account relationship manager at Five Star Call Centers, “Our forecasting and staffing improved tremendously after switching to the new analytics feed. What’s more, our agents were able to drop their average call handle times—including post-call work—from about 20 minutes to 15.” A combination of improved telephony, rapid access to accurate customer data, and knowledge management—all in a unified view for agents—has made them far more productive. Zerfas enthused, “Our agents’ job is so much easier now. I see a lot fewer issues with the phone system, with simplified call transfers, escalations, and knowledge management.” Now that they have the right tools, agent satisfaction—a critical measure for most call centers—is up.

Plus, Five Star Call Centers were able to accelerate agent onboarding times for their client so they can get started in a mere two hours. In addition, billing is quick and simple because all the services and providers are in the AWS Marketplace. This all added up to a lot of people hours saved.

In addition to time, security is critical for BPOs, and Local Measure has a strong security focus. Possibly the single most important security measure that it offers is that unlike most other contact center platforms, it has set up data residency for end customers, within their own AWS environment in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Jonathan Barouch, founder and chief executive officer of Local Measure, added, “We are SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, which means that we save hours every month for Five Star Call Centers by taking that work off their plate.” Additionally, running the AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights allows automatic reporting of Local Measure’s security posture to customers. Further, pre-populating security data typically required in requests for proposals takes care of another time-consuming security concern for Five Star Call Centers.

With a secure solution that streamlines its workflows, Five Star Call Center’s next step with Local Measure is to deploy generative artificial intelligence (AI) to continue improving its agent experience. Five Star Call Centers plans to trial generative AI services from AWS including Amazon Connect Contact Lens for agent assessments, and Amazon Bedrock for automation of call summaries, handover notes, call categorization, and populating forms.

As Barouch said, “One of our core values is, if you deliver a delightful agent experience, you deliver a good customer experience.”