True Alliance Uses Amazon Connect to Enhance Customer Service and Drive Loyalty for Global Brands

True Alliance represents 22 global brands in Australia, including The North Face, Lacoste, Speedo, Coach, and Under Armour. It chose Salesforce Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect to improve customer experience and help agents become more effective. To help implement the solution, True Alliance worked alongside AWS Advanced Consulting Partner TTEC Digital, which specializes in the design and delivery of Amazon Connect and contact center solutions. The customer service solution provides a single user interface for agents across voice and digital channels. This helps True Alliance’s agents have a 360-degree view of customers for the global brands the company represents. Agents can find information quickly, personalize the experience, and create a full brand experience for customers

As a large private distributor of premium retail brands in the Australia and New Zealand markets, True Alliance wanted to create a scalable and reliable system to support customers interacting with its contact center. The company sought to gain greater visibility into customers’ behaviors and the capacity to generate reports on call flow data in real time.

True Alliance chose Salesforce Service Cloud Voice, powered by Amazon Connect — a simple-to-use, scalable, agile, and open omnichannel cloud contact center from Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company chose to work with AWS Partner TTEC Digital to help with the implementation, due to TTEC Digital’s specialization in the design and delivery of contact center services. The solution combines contact center and CRM functionality in a single customer engagement platform.

Service Cloud Voice uses AWS and Salesforce cloud services to create an engagement platform that brings together voice conversations, digital channels, and CRM data in real time for both agents and supervisors. Using Amazon Connect as the backbone of a natively integrated telephony solution that incorporates Salesforce and other services, True Alliance reinvented its contact center to create a full brand experience for customers while increasing the efficiency and productivity of customer service agents.

“Today’s customers expect brands to know them and deliver seamless customer service at every touch point,” says Jon Gamble, Regional Sales Director of Salesforce. “Natively combining operational data and contact center data in a single CRM platform is helping True Alliance to provide the superior, personalized experience customers demand.”

TTEC Digital specializes in helping clients use Service Cloud Voice, Amazon Connect and machine learning services from AWS to drive smarter customer experiences through self-service, automation, and personalization. True Alliance chose Service Cloud Voice because they required a cloud-based, reliable, scalable, flexible, and open customer experience platform that would allow differentiated experiences for each brand. TTEC Digital partnered with True Alliance to migrate to Salesforce’s Service Cloud Voice, which would deliver enhanced voice routing, tailored messaging experiences for each brand, and real-time visibility for supervisors.

Data about True Alliance’s customers exists within Salesforce, which communicates with Amazon Connect using AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets users run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. Powered by Amazon Connect, Service Cloud Voice can anticipate customer needs by knowing who the customer is, identifying the customer’s history, and directing the caller to the appropriate agent to provide a personalized experience. Call recordings get stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

After the migration, TTEC Digital worked with True Alliance to redesign its call flows, creating an interactive voice response flow from the customer’s initial engagement through to the agent specific to each of more than 20 individual brands. As order volumes and customer engagement increased rapidly—in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic—TTEC Digital recommended including brand messaging to help customers connect with appropriate self-service options when possible. TTEC Digital assisted with the scripting, prompts, and inclusion of brand-centric messaging throughout the call flow and in the hold loop. “TTEC Digital was the right partner,” says Regan MacDonald, Group IT Manager at True Alliance. “We ended up with a system that was far more capable, far more scalable, and did the job a lot better than what we were previously running.”

The solution provides customers with a cohesive experience throughout their interaction with True Alliance customer support. For example, the company updated its New Zealand call flow to communicate brand-specific delays to customers during the COVID-19 pandemic and offer them solutions throughout the call flow. Situations that the interactive voice response could not resolve were redirected to a live agent, along with the contextual data about the customer. The complete visibility helps agents focus on the conversation instead of searching for information or asking customers to repeat themselves. “A lot of the decisions in terms of how we built a really responsive call flow were driven by TTEC Digital recommendations,” says Dawn Ware, Senior Business Analyst at True Alliance. “TTEC Digital handled almost 100 percent of our implementation, which was amazing because we didn’t have enough capacity or resources within our team to have an expert in that area.” In fact, TTEC Digital continues to provide services for True Alliance, helping with upgrades, responding to feedback, and being on call for additional assistance.

To further enhance the solution, TTEC Digital added CX Intelligence by eMite on AWS Marketplace, a software-as-a-service product that delivers immediate value for contact center managers by providing advanced real time and historical data visualization using dashboards and wallboards for better insights. “It’s super powerful for the business and gives us far more insights into what’s going on than we had previously,” MacDonald says. “Because of those live metrics, we can dynamically change what our team members are doing: put more people in the call queues versus answering emails or direct messaging. We can handle bigger capacities and are giving our customers a much better experience.”

Working with TTEC Digital, True Alliance plans to increase its use of artificial intelligence to enhance the customer experience and take workloads off customer service agents, especially during peak periods. For example, True Alliance expects to incorporate chatbots and build virtual agents using Amazon Lex, a fully managed artificial-intelligence service with advanced natural language models to design, build, test, and deploy conversational interfaces in applications. Using artificial intelligence and other innovative solutions helps True Alliance continue to deliver more personalized services to customers and think about driving innovation in customer service.

“AWS services work seamlessly in the background and are the telephony engine driving the solution,” says Ware. “Working in one environment has helped provide a cohesive customer journey. That was a game changer for our business. Our agents can work far more efficiently and productively and provide the customer with a far better experience as well.”