Accenture Brazil Transforms Service Desk Operations Using AWS

Accenture is a leading global professional services company with more than 733,000 employees serving clients in 120 countries. Accenture's operation in Brazil had long operated a service desk that provided phone-based, 24/7 support for 17,000 employees throughout Latin America. Call center management wanted to scale services to not only align with the company’s growth, but to expand its services to clients who wanted to outsource their service desk operations with Accenture.

However, Accenture Brazil’s call center operations required major investments in on-premises infrastructure, preventing it from gaining the agility and cost effectiveness it needed to grow.

"We were tied to a rigid, fixed-cost business model with negotiated contracts for our staffing, services, and infrastructure suppliers,” said Eduardo Salomão, Accenture Brazil go-to-market lead for AWS. “If demand fell below average, we would have to pay for services we didn’t need. If we needed to add capacity, we would have to renegotiate contracts with our service providers. It was a very slow and complex process.”

Other challenges added more layers of cost and complexity. Planning for surge capacity, for example, required Accenture Brazil to overprovision its expensive, on-premises call center infrastructure. Adding new service desk clients often required complex, time-consuming integrations with the client's own in-house systems.

When AWS introduced Amazon Connect in 2017, Accenture Brazil was confident that the platform could provide a simple, scalable, secure, and cost-effective foundation for its call center infrastructure. Since the regulatory environment in Brazil at the time prevented Accenture Brazil from fully migrating away from the country's local telecom infrastructure, Accenture Brazil worked with AWS to implement a hybrid solution, running Amazon Connect integrated with the existing telephony infrastructure. The new platform allowed Accenture Brazil to extend beyond internal requests, and act as a contact center-as-a-service for its international clients. "Amazon Connect reduced our operational costs and gave us greater flexibility," Salomão said.

In 2023, when AWS was officially cleared to provide telephone infrastructure services in Brazil, Accenture Brazil began the full-scale migration of its own call center infrastructure. "Fully moving to Amazon Connect simplified our infrastructure, reduced our costs, and gave us far more flexibility than we had in the past," Salomão said.

Accenture Brazil completed the migration process in less than a month—with most of that time devoted to Accenture’s additional quality assurance and testing rather than technical implementation.

Accenture Brazil did not have to compromise security for agility because of the inherent protections of Amazon Connect, which was one of the determining factors for the company’s complete move to the cloud-based contact center. With remote employees addressing requests for customers that may involve sensitive information, Accenture Brazil needed sufficient controls in place. “Amazon Connect allows us to continue our emphasis on security. Everything is encrypted, and we can ensure that each employee only has access to the information they need,” Salomão said.

Completing its migration to Amazon Connect yielded a simpler and leaner infrastructure, freeing up resources to further innovate on services.

"We can scale our infrastructure resources up or down, quickly and with very little effort, while paying only for the services that we're using," Salomão said. As a result, Accenture Brazil has already cut its infrastructure costs by 50 percent or more, with the potential for even bigger cost savings in the future.

Integration with other AWS services has helped Accenture Brazil more efficiently route calls, broaden the geographical footprint of its service area, and better evaluate operator performance and customer satisfaction. With Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly, the company implements multi-lingual chatbots and automated voice systems required for call-based self-service offerings. These self-service options ensure that the system's human operators spend their time when and where they're needed most. Using Amazon Comprehend, which provides sentiment analysis, leadership can assess operators’ alignment with the company’s service goals and inform improvement initiatives.

"Today, we have more than a dozen customers using our service desk for their own operations," Salomão said. "We answer service and support requests in Portuguese, Spanish, and English from clients and employees from North America, Europe, and Asia."

Now, Accenture Brazil’s virtual contact center is a 24/7 operation employing more than 200 operators providing business-critical live support. The center’s newfound flexibility, cost effectiveness, and scalability gives Accenture Brazil room to take customer service to the next level, with plans to expand use cases for ML and generative AI with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker.